Mannering talked gently to her.

“Be sure he did not cry out.  He felt no pain, no shock—­I am sure of that.  To die is no hardship to the dead, remember.  He is at peace, Mary.  You must come and see him presently.  Your father will call you soon.  There is just a look of wonder in his face—­ no fear, no suffering.  Keep that in mind.”

“He could not have felt fear.  He knew of nothing that a brave man might fear, except doing wrong.  Nobody knows how good he was but me.  His father loved him fiercely, passionately; but he never knew how good he was, because Tom did not think quite like old Mr. May.  I must write and say that Tom is dangerously ill, and cannot recover.  That will break it to him.  Tom was the only earthly affection he had.  It will be terrible when he comes.”

They left her, and, after they had gone, she rose, fell on her knees, and so remained, motionless and tearless, for a long time.  Through her own desolation, as yet unrealized, there still persisted the thought of her husband’s father.  It seemed that her mind could dwell on his isolation, while powerless to present the truth of her husband’s death to her.  By some strange mental operation, not unbeneficent, she saw his grief more vividly than as yet she felt her own.  She rose presently, quick-eared to wait the call, and went to her desk in the window.  Then she wrote a letter to her father-in-law, and pictured his ministering at that moment to his church.  Her inclination was to soften the blow, yet she knew that could only be a cruel kindness.  She told him, therefore, that his son must die.  Then she remembered that he was so near.  A telegram must go rather than a letter, and he would be at Chadlands before nightfall.  She destroyed her letter and set about a telegram.  Jane Bond came in, and she asked her to dispatch the telegram as quickly as possible.  Her old nurse, an elderly spinster, to whom Mary was the first consideration in existence, had brought her a cup of soup and some toast.  It had seemed to Jane the right thing to do.

Mary thanked her and drank a little.  She passed through a mental phase as of dreaming—­a sensation familiar in sleep; but she knew that this was not a sleeping but a waking experience.  She waited for her father, yet dreaded to hear him return.  She thought of human footsteps and the difference between them.  She remembered that she would never hear Tom’s long stride again.

It often broke into a run, she remembered, as he approached her; and she would often run toward him, too—­to banish the space that separated them.  She blamed herself bitterly that she had decreed to sleep in her old nursery.  She had loved it so, and the small bed that had held her from childhood; yet, if she had slept with him, this might not have happened.

“To think that only a wall separated us!” she kept saying to herself.  “And I sleeping and dreaming of him, and he dying only a few yards away.”