Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/269

Rh suburbs? Too late! The blank face of the London house, the scrupulously-drawn blinds, advertised the fact even before she jumped from the cab, smudging her dress on the muddy wheel in her anxiety to gain the door. They were too late, irretrievably too late, she knew, a few minutes later, when the young wife, rising from an armchair in the dimly-lighted dining-room, greeted them in her usual smooth, suave, unemotional tones. She remembered the commonplaces that followed like things heard in a dream. Her husband's dreary inquiries, the young widow's explanations of how Colonel Rathbourne had rallied, and had actually died sitting in his chair in a dressing-gown, and how thoughtful he had been in alluding, some quarter of an hour before his death, to an alteration he had made in his will. The words reached her, but conveyed little meaning to her dazed perceptions. The very sound of the two voices seemed to come as from a distance, as the sound of other voices had once done, when she lay ill as a little child. A bewildered sense of the unreality of things substantial rocked in her brain. A great gap, a vague but impassable gulf lay surely between her and these living, breathing people, so concerned with the material trivialities of life. It was this something dual in her consciousness which made her wonder, half-an-hour later, if in very truth it were she, or some other woman, who mechanically followed her sister-in-law upstairs to the dead man's bedside. If it were she who recoiled so suddenly and with so agonised a cry at the sight of that shrouded form? She felt certain of nothing, except that she hated this wife of six months standing, with her assured voice, her handsome shoulders, and her manœuvred waist. For six whole months she had been his wife. . ..

Mrs. Rathbourne shivered, the square wrists shook with such violence that the watch she held nearly slipped from her fingers. To