The diplomatist and his lady gradually edged back but Rose remained beside the Countess, who breathed quick, and seemed to have lost her self-command.

Thinking he was apprehended, Mr. Goren said:  ’I ’m going down to-night to take care of the shop.  He ’s to be buried in his old uniform.  You had better come with me by the night-coach, if you would see the last of him, young man.’

Breaking an odd pause that had fallen, the Countess cried aloud, suddenly: 

‘In his uniform!’

Mr. Goren felt his arm seized and his legs hurrying him some paces into isolation.  ‘Thanks! thanks!’ was murmured in his ear.  ’Not a word more.  Evan cannot bear it.  Oh! you are good to have come, and we are grateful.  My father! my father!’

She had to tighten her hand and wrist against her bosom to keep herself up.  She had to reckon in a glance how much Rose had heard, or divined.  She had to mark whether the Count had understood a syllable.  She had to whisper to Evan to hasten away with the horrible man.

She had to enliven his stunned senses, and calm her own.  And with mournful images of her father in her brain, the female Spartan had to turn to Rose, and speculate on the girl’s reflective brows, while she said, as over a distant relative, sadly, but without distraction:  ‘A death in the family!’ and preserved herself from weeping her heart out, that none might guess the thing who did not positively know it.  Evan touched the hand of Rose without meeting her eyes.  He was soon cast off in Mr. Goren’s boat.  Then the Countess murmured final adieux; twilight under her lids, but yet a smile, stately, affectionate, almost genial.  Rose, her sweet Rose, she must kiss.  She could have slapped Rose for appearing so reserved and cold.  She hugged Rose, as to hug oblivion of the last few minutes into her.  The girl leant her cheek, and bore the embrace, looking on her with a kind of wonder.

Only when alone with the Count, in the brewer’s carriage awaiting her on shore, did the lady give a natural course to her grief; well knowing that her Silva would attribute it to the darkness of their common exile.  She wept:  but in the excess of her misery, two words of strangely opposite signification, pronounced by Mr. Goren; two words that were at once poison and antidote, sang in her brain; two words that painted her dead father from head to foot, his nature and his fortune:  these were the Shop, and the Uniform.

Oh! what would she not have given to have-seen and bestowed on her beloved father one last kiss!  Oh! how she hoped that her inspired echo of Uniform, on board the Jocasta, had drowned the memory, eclipsed the meaning, of that fatal utterance of Shop!

CHAPTER V

THE FAMILY AND THE FUNERAL