Emily was now able to descend the stairs without difficulty.  The first sight of the little parlour cost her a renewal of her keenest suffering.  There was the couch on which his dead body had been placed; that the chair in which he always rested after tea before going up to the laboratory; in a little frame on the mantelpiece was his likeness, an old one and much faded.  She moved about, laying her hand on this object and that; she took the seat by the window where she had waited each evening, till she saw him at the gate, to rise at once and open to him.  She had not shed tears since that last day of his life, and now it was only a passing mist that dimmed her eyes.  Her sorrow was not of the kind which so relieves itself.

She had come down early, in order to spend some time in the room before Wilfrid’s arrival.  She sat in her father’s chair, once more in the attitude of motionless brooding.  But her countenance was not as self-controlled as during the past days; emotions, struggles, at work within her found their outward expression.  At times she breathed quickly, as if in pain; often her eyes closed.  In her worn face, the features marked themselves with strong significance; it was beauty of a kind only to be felt by a soul in sympathy with her own.  To others she would have appeared the image of stern woe.  The gentleness which had been so readily observable beneath her habitual gravity was absorbed in the severity of her suffering and spiritual conflicts; only a touching suggestion of endurance, of weakness bearing up against terrible fatality, made its plea to tenderness.  Withal, she looked no older than in the days of her happiness; a young life, a young heart, smitten with unutterable woe.

When the sound of the opening gate made itself heard, she lay back for a moment in the very sickness of pain it recalled the past so vividly, and chilled her heart with the fear of what she had now before her.  She stood, as soon as the knock came at the front door, and kept the same position as Wilfrid entered.

He was startled at the sight of her, but in an instant was holding both her hands, gazing deep into her eyes with an ecstasy of tenderness.  He kissed her lips, and, as he did so, felt a shudder in the hands he pressed.  A few whispered words were all that he could speak; Emily kept silence.  Then he sat near to her; her hand was still in his, but gave no sign of responsive affection, and was very cold.

‘It was kind to let me see you so soon,’ he said.  Her fixed look of hard suffering began to impress him painfully, even with a kind of fear.  Emily’s face at this moment was that of one who is only half sensible to words spoken.  Now she herself spoke for the first time.

’You will forgive me that I did not write.  It would have been better, perhaps; it would have been easier to me.  Yet why should I fear to say to you, face to face, what I have to say?’

The last sentence was like self-questioning uttered aloud; her eyes were fixed on him, and with appeal which searched his heart.