ss Amory had remained after the other people had gone
away, and she was listening to the wind, too.

"We are both old women," she had said. "We have both lived long enough to
have passed through afternoons like this more than once before. Howsoever
bad other hours may be, it seems to me that these are always the worst."

"Just after--everything--has been taken away," Mrs. Latimer said now;
"the house seems so empty. Faith," tremulously, "even Faith can't help
you not to feel that everything has gone--such a long, long way off."

She did not wipe away the tear that fell on her cheek. She looked very
small and meek in her deep mourning. She presented to Miss Amory's
imagination the figure of a lovable child grown old without having lost
its child temperament.

"But I must not complain," she went on, with an effort to smile at Miss
Amory's ugly old intelligently sympathetic countenance. "It must have
been all over in a second, and he could have felt no pain at all. Death
by accident is always an awful shock to those left behind; but it must
scarcely be like death to--those who go. He was quite well; he had just
bought the pistol and took it out to show to Mr. Baird. Mr. Baird himself
did not understand how it happened."

"It is nearly always so--that no one quite sees how it is done," Miss
Amory answered. "Do not let yourself think of it."

She was sitting quite near to Mrs. Latimer, and she leaned forward and
put her hand over the cold, little, shrivelled one lying on the lap of
the mourning-dress.

"Though it was so sudden," she said, "it was an end not unlike
Margery's--the slipping out of life without realising that the last hour
had come."

"Yes; I have thought that, too."

She looked up at the portrait on the wall--the portrait of the bright
girl-face. Her own face lighted into a smile.

"It is so strange to think that they are together again," she said. "They
will have so much to tell each other."

"Yes," said Miss Amory; "yes."

She got up herself and went and stood before the picture. Mrs. Latimer
rose and came and stood beside her.

"Mr. Baird has been with me every day," she said. "He has been like a son
to me."

A carriage drew up before the house, and, as the occupant got out, both
women turned to look.

Mrs. Latimer turned a shade paler.

"They have got back from the funeral," she said. "It is Mr. Baird."

Then came the ring at the front door, the footsteps in the passage, and
Baird came