“Never a coward, Toby, never a coward,” my grandmother cried out piteously, kissing his hand.

My grandfather put out his arm and drew me close to him.

“We must bear it together, we three,” he said.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

We had dinner in the little black-panelled room off the hall, Neil waiting on us with a great assiduity.  Now that the worst had happened and my grandfather’s pride and courage had risen to meet it, it seemed to me that he looked better than he had looked for many months.  To be sure he was very pale, but he had a look of resolution which became him, instead of the cowed and burdened look he had worn of late.

I remember that there were pheasants on the table and my grandfather asked where they had come from.  There had been a constant shower of delicacies rained on us from Damerstown, and we should have grown sybarites if we had cared about such things.  Neil, as though he understood, answered him that they had been shot in our own woods, and added that the fine peaches and grapes which were in a dish on the table were from our own houses.  I was not sure it was true.  We didn’t grow peaches even in a hothouse in December; but I let it pass, and my elders were too engrossed in their thoughts to notice.

Once or twice I saw that the old couple held each other’s hands below the table-cloth, and I felt that as long as they were together they could bear anything.

My grandfather ate a little of a pheasant’s breast, and my grandmother followed his example; but though we made a show of eating it did not amount to very much.  As for me, a curious sense of expectancy seemed to have taken possession of my mind, to the exclusion of other things.  I could hardly say at what moment it had begun; but it grew till I was, in a manner of speaking, heady with it.  We sat there very quiet, but all the time I was listening, not only with the ears of my body but with the ears of my heart.

After dinner Neil cleared away the dinner-things and removed the cloth.  My grandmother bade him replenish the fire, and he went away and returned with a great armful of logs.

I guessed that my grandmother felt that in here we were out of sight of the preparations for the wedding which were going on everywhere else in the house.

Neil left the wine and the fruit on the table, stirred up the fire, and went away.

My grandparents sat in their chairs either side of the fireplace, I in the middle at first; but presently I changed places with my grandmother, and she sat holding Lord St. Leger’s hand in hers while the firelight leaped up showing their old, careworn, troubled faces, which yet had a look of love and new peace in them.

Presently my grandfather fell asleep, and we talked in whispers, my grandmother and I. She still held his hand, and her eyes kept watching with a tender anxiety his pale face, almost as pale as a dead face, against the green velvet of the chair.