At length she was able to weep.  Gazing constantly at the dead face, she linked it at last with some far-off memory of tenderness, and that brought her tears.  She held the cold hand against her heart and eased herself with passionate sobbing, with low wails, with loving utterance of his name.  Thus it happened that she did not hear when someone knocked lightly at the door and entered.  A shadow across the still features told her of another’s presence.  Starting back, she saw a lady from whose pale, beautiful face a veil had just been raised.  The stranger, who was regarding her with tenderly compassionate eyes, said: 

‘I am Mrs. Mutimer.’

Emma rose to her feet and drew a little apart.  Her face fell.

‘They told me downstairs,’ Adela pursued, ’that I should find Miss Vine in the room.  Is your name Emma Vine?’

Emma asked herself whether this lady, his wife, could know anything of her story.  It seemed so, from the tone of the question.  She only replied: 

‘Yes, it is.’

Then she again ventured to look up at the woman whose beauty had made her life barren.  There were no signs of tears on Adela’s face; to Emma she seemed cold, though so grave and gentle.  Adela gazed for a while at the dead man.  She, too, felt as though it were all a dream.  The spectacle of Emma’s passionate grief had kept her emotion within her heart, perhaps had weakened it.

‘You have yourself been hurt,’ she said, turning again to the other.

Emma only shook her head.  She suffered terribly from Adela’s presence.

‘I will go,’ she said in a whisper.

‘This is your room, I think?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I stay here?’

‘Of course—­you must.’

Emma was moving towards the door.

‘You wish to go?’ Adela said, uttering the words involuntarily.

‘Yes, I must.’

Adela, left alone, stood gazing at the dead face.  She did not kneel by her husband, as Emma had done, but a terrible anguish came upon her as she gazed; she buried her face in her hands.  Her feeling was more of horror at the crime that had been committed than of individual grief.  Yet grief she knew.  The last words her husband had spoken to her were good and worthy; in her memory they overcame all else.  That parting when he left home had seemed to her like the beginning of a new life for him.  Could not his faults be atoned for otherwise than by this ghastly end?  She had no need to direct her thoughts to the good that was in him.  Even as she had taken his part against his traducers, so she now was stirred in spirit against his murderers.  She felt a solemn gladness in remembering that she had stood before that meeting in the Clerkenwell room and served him as far as it was in a woman’s power to do.  All her long sufferings were forgotten; this supreme calamity of death outweighed them all.  His enemies had murdered him; would they not continue to assail his name?  She resolved that his memory should be her care.  That had nothing to do with love; simple justice demanded it.  Justice and gratitude for the last words he had spoken to her.