"But, Louis, I came to speak to you about Zella. I want you to let me take the poor little thing with me into her room, before— before the men come to—to—"
"No!" cried Louis almost violently. "Esmee "— his sister-in-law drew in her breath with a sharp sound of pain at the name—" would not wish the child to remember her lying there, perhaps frightening her and making her ill."
"But Zella wishes to come, and I think she ought to," said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans with characteristically unmoved persistence.
"I refuse to allow it. You may take her in there, if you must, when the coffin is closed." His tone was absolutely final. "But, Marianne, I wish that you would take Zella out into the garden, at the back of the house, before eleven o'clock this morning."
"Oh, Louis! out so soon ! the servants—"
"Marianne, I do not want her in the house eitherthen or to-morrow afternoon, and I beg that you willdo as I ask."
Marianne, against her better judgment, as she afterwards told her husband, felt that one could only yield. And so Zella knew nothing of the strange men who penetrated into the closed room that morning, and next day heard nothing of the heavy hammering that seemed to Louis de Kervoyou as though it would never cease.
II
ON Wednesday afternoon Mrs. Lloyd-Evans saw her brother-in-law shut himself into the study, after a morning spent in necessary and painful business, and immediately said to Zella, who had been gazing hopelessly into the small fire for the last hour:
"Will you come upstairs with Aunt Marianne now, darling ?"
Zella understood that she meant to visit her mother's room, and her little drawn face became a shade more colourless than before.
She had scarcely seen her father since Aunt Marianne's arrival, and had clung to the weeping, demonstrative tenderness and ceaseless murmured recollections of dear, dear mother that alone seemed to make endurable the endless hours. She crept upstairs with her little shaking hand in Aunt Marianne's, but at the familiar door, which had suddenly grown terrible, Zella began to sob hysterically.
Aunt Marianne tightened her hold on Zella's hand and gently opened the door.
Such a curious hush pervaded the darkened room that Zella instinctively ceased sobbing. At the foot of the bed was a light oak coffin placed upon trestles. It was closed.
In the gloom Zella could make out the familiar shapes of the dressing-table and the big bed and the old armchair she had always known in the bow-window.
Her aunt moved gently forward, fumbling for her handkerchief as she went.
"Wouldn't you like to kneel down and say a little prayer ?" she whispered to Zella, who stood as though stupefied.
Zella's mother had taught her to pray as a baby, but for- the last three years she had dropped the custom, which was meaningless to her. But, thus prompted, she fell upon her knees beside the strange hard coffin, and leant her aching head against the wood. She felt too sick and bewildered to cry any more.
But what was there to pray for, if God would not bring mother back to life again?
Zella looked across at her aunt, whose head was dropped upon her hands.
Suddenly Zella felt that it must all be a nightmare, and that she would presently wake up and find that mother was here and this dreadful dream gone. It couldn't be true. A horrible sort of impatient fury seized her—the fury of the undisciplined soul against pain. She clenched her hands to prevent herself from screaming aloud, and suddenly found that she wanted to go away from this darkened room as she had never wanted anything before. She looked across at her Aunt Marianne with a kind of suppressed rage, and began to pray wildly and half unconsciously:
"O God, let us go—let Aunt Marianne get up and go— I can't bear it—make her get up—make us go away from here—oh, make her get up and go!"
It seemed to her that she had been calling so, madly and agonizedly, upon an unheeding God for hours, when her aunt rose at last and laid a hand upon her shoulder. Zella's little tense form relaxed suddenly, and she felt curiously weak and spent.
Aunt Marianne stooped solemnly and pressed her lips upon the lid of the coffin. Then she paused a moment, and Zella, rising trembling to her feet, bent also and passionately kissed the senseless wood.
"It is good-bye to mother," she thought desperately; but she did not really feel that the hard wood of the coffin and this cold, darkened room had any connection with the sweet, laughing mother whom she had last seen leaning back against her pillows, and saying gaily:
"I shall be quite well again to-morrow."
When they had left the room, Aunt Marianne had said, as she seemed to have said so very often since she came:
"Now, if I were you, I should go and lie down for a little while upon your bed, Zella dear. It will do you good. Let Aunt Marianne come and arrange you comfortably."
Zella mechanically followed Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, and passively allowed herself to be divested of her shoes, helped on to her bed, and covered with a quilt. Mrs. Lloyd-Evans kissed her very kindly, said, " Try and have a little sleep now, darling, just till five o'clock," and rustled softly away.
Zella lay still. She had gone to bed very early the evening before, and had slept all night with the heavy slumber of a child exhausted from crying, and she felt no inclination to sleep again now.
She traced the pattern of the wall-paper idly with her finger. When the funeral was over, would things be as dreadful as they were now? Zella felt that, somehow, it would be terrible to be left alone with her father, who must be so very, very unhappy, poor papa ! although he had not cried and did not talk about mother like Aunt Marianne did. Would he never talk about her any more? Some people did not ever talk of their relations who were dead.
Mother was dead.
Zella came back to that thought with an aching wonder that it should bring no greater pang of realization with it. Perhaps that was what people meant by being stunned with grief. Perhaps one only realized later, when one had got used to being without— No, no! it would be impossible ever to get accustomed to it, ever to be happy again, all one's life long. ... "And I'm only fourteen, and perhaps I may live to be very old," thought Zella, and tears of self-pity welled into her eyes.
She cried a little, but her swollen eyelids burnt and smarted so that presently she stopped.
She had been here a long while; it must be five o'clock, and tea would break the miserable monotony of the day. Zella looked at her watch, and thought, as so often during those unspeakably wretched days of inaction, that it must have stopped. It was not yet a quarter 'past four. She held the watch despairingly to her ear, but it was still going.
It seemed unbearable.
Zella tried to make herself cry again by thinking of all the early recollections of her mother that had made her sob so unrestrainedly when she and Aunt Marianne had talked of them yesterday. But the tears would not come.
She turned over and buried her face in the pillow, unspeakably
