ge and strong, laughing often,
tossing her, she remembered, to the ceiling, his beard jet-black and
his eyebrows bushy and overhanging. Once that vigour, afterwards this
horror. She shook away from her last vision of him but it returned
again and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like an ill-omened
messenger. And all the life between seemed to be suddenly wiped away as
a sponge wipes figures off a slate. After the death of her mother she
had made the best of her circumstances. There had been many days when
life had been unpleasant, and in the last year, as his miserliness had
grown upon him, his ill-temper at any fancied extravagance had been
almost that of an insane man, but Maggie knew very little of the
affairs of other men and it seemed to her that every one had some
disadvantage with which to grapple. She did not pretend to care for her
father, she was very lonely because the villagers hated him, but she
had always made the best of everything because she had never had an
intimate friend to tell her that that was a foolish thing to do.

It was indeed marvellous how isolated her life had been; she knew
simply nothing about the world at all.

She could not pretend that she was sorry that her father had died; and
yet she missed him because she knew very well that she was now no one's
business, that she was utterly and absolutely alone in the universe. It
might be said that she could not be utterly alone when she had her
Uncle Mathew, but, although she was ignorant of life, she knew her
Uncle Mathew ... Nevertheless, he did something to remove the sharp
alarm of her sudden isolation. Upon the day after her father's death he
was at his very best, his kindest, and most gentle. He was rather
pathetic, having drunk nothing out of respect to the occasion; he felt,
somewhere deep down in him, a persistent exaltation that his brother
Charles was dead, but he knew that it was not decent to allow this
feeling to conquer him and he was truly anxious to protect and comfort
his niece so well as he was able. Early in the afternoon he suggested
that they should go for a walk. Everything necessary had been done. An
answer to their telegram had been received from his sister Anne that
she could not leave London until that night but would arrive at Clinton
St. Mary station at half-past nine to-morrow morning. That would be in
good time for the funeral, a ceremony that was to be conducted by the
Rev. Tom Trefusis, the sporting v