ts on the extreme edge of the lawn. It was Leonora's own little
study that we were in and we were waiting for the tea to be brought. I,
as I said, was sitting in the deep chair, Leonora was standing in the
window twirling the wooden acorn at the end of the window-blind cord
desultorily round and round. She looked across the lawn and said, as far
as I can remember:

"Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on the
lawn."

I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in
England. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment
at all, for I remember her exact words:

"I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide."

I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two seemed
to have at that moment. It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train,
it wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal--it was just that there was
nothing to wait for. Nothing. There was an extreme stillness with the
remote and intermittent sound of the wind. There was the grey light in
that brown, small room. And there appeared to be nothing else in the
world. I knew then that Leonora was about to let me into her full
confidence. It was as if--or no, it was the actual fact that--Leonora
with an odd English sense of decency had determined to wait until Edward
had been in his grave for a full week before she spoke. And with some
vague motive of giving her an idea of the extent to which she must
permit herself to make confidences, I said slowly--and these words too I
remember with exactitude--"Did Florence commit suicide? I didn't know."

I was just, you understand, trying to let her know that, if she were
going to speak she would have to talk about a much wider range of things
than she had before thought necessary.

So that that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had committed
suicide. It had never entered my head. You may think that I had been
singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have
been an imbecile. But consider the position.

In such circumstances of clamour, of outcry, of the crash of many
people running together, of the professional reticence of such people
as hotel-keepers, the traditional reticence of such "good people" as the
Ashburnhams--in such circumstances it is some little material object,
always, that catches the eye and that appeals to the imagination. I had
no possible guide to the idea of suicide and the sight of the litt