seen it with her own eyes on the 'Royal Oak' kitchen table. She must not
allow her mind to dwell upon it. Now Wynn was dead, and everything
connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy
poker into red black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the
oak would die too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a
family that had a knack of dying under, as she told Miss Fowler, 'most
distressing circumstances.' She would stay where she was till she was
entirely satisfied that It was dead--dead as dear papa in the late
'eighties; aunt Mary in eighty-nine; mamma in 'ninety-one; cousin Dick
in ninety-five; Lady McCausland's housemaid in 'ninety-nine; Lady
McCausland's sister in nineteen hundred and one; Wynn buried five days
ago; and Edna Gerritt still waiting for decent earth to hide her. As she
thought--her underlip caught up by one faded canine, brows knit and
nostrils wide--she wielded the poker with lunges that jarred the grating
at the bottom, and careful scrapes round the brick-work above. She
looked at her wrist-watch. It was getting on to half-past four, and the
rain was coming down in earnest. Tea would be at five. If It did not die
before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change.
Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn's things were burning well in
spite of the hissing wet, though now and again a book-back with a quite
distinguishable title would be heaved up out of the mass. The exercise
of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of
her bones. She hummed--Mary never had a voice--to herself. She had never
believed in all those advanced views--though Miss Fowler herself leaned
a little that way--of woman's work in the world; but now she saw there
was much to be said for them. This, for instance, was _her_ work--work
which no man, least of all Dr. Hennis, would ever have done. A man, at
such a crisis, would be what Wynn called a 'sportsman'; would leave
everything to fetch help, and would certainly bring It into the house.
Now a woman's business was to make a happy home for--for a husband and
children. Failing these--it was not a thing one should allow one's mind
to dwell upon--but--

'Stop it!' Mary cried once more across the shadows. 'Nein, I tell you!
Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'

_But_ it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could still be
useful--more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a
pavior