each other and think, and
move to and fro aimlessly in the large bedroom, and light the gas at
dusk, and examine from moment to moment those contracted pupils and that
damp white brow, and listen for the faint occasional breaths. They did
not think the thoughts which, could they have foreseen the situation,
they might have expected to think. It did not occur to them to search
for the causes of the disaster, nor to speculate upon its results in
regard to themselves: they surrendered to the supreme fact. They were
all incapable of logical and ordered reflections, and in the hushed
torpor of their secret hearts there wandered, loosely, little
disconnected ideas and sensations; as that the Stanway family was at
length getting its full share of vicissitude and misfortune, that John
was after all more important and more truly dominant and more intimately
a part of their lives than they had imagined, that this affair was a
thousand miles removed from that of Uncle Meshach, that they were fully
supplied with mourning, and that suicide was mysteriously different from
their previous notion of it. The impressive thoughts, the obvious
thoughts--that if their creeds were sound, a soul was about to enter
into eternal torment, and that their lives would be violently changed,
and that they would be branded before the world as the wife and the
daughters of a defaulter and a self-murderer--did not by any means
absorb their minds in those first hours.

In the attitude of the girls towards Leonora there was a sort of
religious deference, as of priestesses to one soon to be sacrificed.
'She is the central figure of the tragedy,' they had the air of saying
to each other. 'We feel the affliction, but it cannot be demanded from
us that we should feel it as she feels it. We are only beginning to
live; we have the future; but she--she will have nothing. She will be
the widow.' And the significance of that terrible word--all that it
implied of social diminishment, of feeding on memory, and of mere
waiting for death--seemed to cling about Leonora as she stood restlessly
observant by the bed. And when Rose urged her to drink some tea, she
could not help drinking the tea humbly, from a sense of the duty of
doing what she was told. It was not Rose's fault that Rose was superior,
and that only twenty-four hours ago she had coldly informed her mother
that no act of her father's would surprise her. Leonora resigned herself
to humility.

'Mamma,' said