Page:Phillpotts - The Grey Room (Macmillan, 1921).djvu/81

68 "How beautiful and happy he looks," she said. "But what I loved is gone; and, going, it has changed all the rest. This is not Tom—only the least part of him."

Her father bowed his head.

"I felt so when your mother died, my dearest child."

Then she knelt down and put her hand on the hand of the dead man and prayed. Her father knelt beside her, and it was he, not the young widow, who wept.

She rose presently.

"I can think of him better away from him now," she said. "I will not see him again."

They returned to her old nursery, and he told her that he was going to face life and take the head of his table at luncheon.

"How brave of you, dear father," she said.

Sir Walter waited for the gong to sound, but it did not, and he rebuked himself for thinking that it would sound. Masters had a more correct sense of the fitness of things than he. He thought curiously upon this incident, and suspected that he must be unhinged a little. Then he remembered a thing that he had desired to say to Mary and returned to her.

"I do not wish you to sleep in this room to-night, my darling," he said.

"Jane has begged me not to. I am going to sleep with her," she answered.