old songs and ballads in which daisies and daffodillies
and lovers' vows and smiles are so strangely inwoven with tombs and
ghosts, with murders and all manner of grim things. She had not had
education enough to spoil her nerve. She was able to take the rough with
the smooth. She was able to take all life for her province, and death
too.

The Duke was dead. This was the stupendous outline she had grasped: now
let it be filled in. She had been stricken: now let her be racked. Soon
after her daughter had moved away, Mrs. Batch dried her eyes, and bade
Clarence tell just what had happened. She did not flinch. Modern Katie
did.

Such had ever been the Duke's magic in the household that Clarence
had at first forgotten to mention that any one else was dead. Of
this omission he was glad. It promised him a new lease of importance.
Meanwhile, he described in greater detail the Duke's plunge. Mrs.
Batch's mind, while she listened, ran ahead, dog-like, into the
immediate future, ranging around: "the family" would all be here
to-morrow, the Duke's own room must be "put straight" to-night, "I was
of speaking"...

Katie's mind harked back to the immediate past--to the tone of that
voice, to that hand which she had kissed, to the touch of those lips on
her brow, to the door-step she had made so white for him, day by day...

The sound of the rain had long ceased. There was the noise of a
gathering wind.

"Then in went a lot of others," Clarence was saying. "And they all
shouted out 'Zuleika!' just like he did. Then a lot more went in.
First I thought it was some sort of fun. Not it!" And he told how,
by inquiries further down the river, he had learned the extent of the
disaster. "Hundreds and hundreds of them--ALL of them," he summed up.
"And all for the love of HER," he added, as with a sulky salute to
Romance.

Mrs. Batch had risen from her chair, the better to cope with such
magnitude. She stood with wide-spread arms, silent, gaping. She seemed,
by sheer force of sympathy, to be expanding to the dimensions of a
crowd.

Intensive Katie recked little of all these other deaths. "I only know,"
she said, "that he hated her."

"Hundreds and hundreds--ALL," intoned Mrs. Batch, then gave a sudden
start, as having remembered something. Mr. Noaks! He, too! She staggered
to the door, leaving her actual offspring to their own devices, and went
heavily up the stairs, her mind scampering again before her.... If he
was safe and sound,