“It is impossible,” she said.  “What good would be served?”

“What good?” repeated the other.

The evening was falling swiftly, layer on layer of twilight, as they turned to come back to the house.  The steeple of the church rose up on their left, slender and ghostly against the yellow sky, out of the black yews and cypresses that lay banked below it.  They stopped and looked at it a moment, as it aspired to heaven from the bones that lay about its base, like an eternal resurrection wrought in stone.  There all about it were the mortal and the dead; the stones and iron slabs leaned, as they knew, in hundreds about the grass; and round them again stood the roofs, beginning now to kindle under the eaves, where the living slept and ate.  There was a rumbling of heavy carts somewhere beyond the village, a crack or two of a whip, the barking of a dog.

Then they turned again and went up to the house.

* * * * *

It was the chaplain who was late this evening for supper.  The others waited a few minutes by the fire, but there was no sign of him.  A servant was sent up to his room and came back to report that he had changed his cassock and gone out; a boy had come from the parish-priest, said the man, ten minutes before, and Mr. Carleton had probably been sent for.

They waited yet five minutes, but the priest did not appear, and they sat down.  Supper was nearly over before before he came.  He came in by the side-door from the court, splashed with mud, and looking pale and concerned.  He went straight up to Sir James.

“May I speak with you, sir?” he said.

The old man got up at once, and went down the hall with him.

The rest waited, expecting them to return, but there was no sign of them; and Ralph at last rose and led the way to the oak-parlour.  As they passed the door of Sir James’s room they heard the sound of voices within.

Conversation was a very difficult matter that evening.  Ralph had behaved with considerable grace and tact, but Nicholas had not responded.  Ever since his arrival on the day before the funeral he had eyed Ralph like a strange dog intruded into a house; Mary had hovered round her husband, watchful and anxious, stepping hastily into gaps in the conversation, sliding in a sentence or two as Nicholas licked his lips in preparation for a snarl; once even putting her hand swiftly on his and drowning a growl with a word of her own.  Ralph had been wonderfully self-controlled; only once had Beatrice seen him show his teeth for a moment as his brother-in-law had scowled more plainly than usual.

The atmosphere was charged to-night, now that the master of the house was away; and as Ralph took his seat in his father’s chair, Beatrice had caught her breath for a moment as she saw the look on Nicholas’s face.  It seemed as if the funeral had lifted a stone that had hitherto held the two angry spirits down; Nicholas, after all, was but a son-in-law, and Ralph, to his view at least, a bad son.  She feared that both might think that a quarrel did not outrage decency; but she feared for Nicholas more than for Ralph.