"My dear," she whispered, "G.o.d will give you strength to bear this awful trial."

Dora recovered her breath and re-arranged her crushed habiliments before inquiring, with just sufficient feeling to save her from downright rudeness, "What is the matter; has something else happened?"

Sister Cecilia drew back. She was vaguely conscious of having run mentally against a brick wall. There was something new and unusual about Dora which she could not understand--something, if she could only have seen it, suggestive of the quiet, strong man in whose honour the whole parish wore mourning. But Sister Cecilia was not a subtle woman. She had had so little experience of the world, of men and of women, that she fell easily into the error of thinking that they were all to be treated alike and with equal success by little maxims culled from fourpenny-halfpenny devotional books.

"No, dear," she exclaimed; "I was referring to our terrible loss. My heart has been bleeding for you--"

"It is very kind, I'm sure," said Dora quietly; "I forgot that I had not seen you since the news reached us."

It is probable that her self-control cost her more than she suspected.

Her lips were drawn and dry. She wore a thick veil, which she carefully abstained from lifting above the level of her eyes. "I am sure," moaned Sister Cecilia, "it has been a most trying time for us all. I wonder that Mrs. Agar has borne up so bravely. Her health is wonderful, considering."

Dora sat looking straight in front of her. She was withdrawing her gloves slowly. Her face was that of a person whose mind was made up for the endurance of an operation.

The twaddling voice, the characteristic reference to health, were intensely aggravating. There are some women who talk of their own health before the dead are buried. They do not seem to be able to separate grief from bodily ill. Clad in c.r.a.pe, they rush to the seaside, and there, presumably because grief affects their legs, they hire a man to wheel themselves and Sorrow in a bath-chair. Why--oh, why! does bereavement drive women into bath-chairs on the King's Road, or the Lees, or the Hoe?

"Wonderful!" said Dora.

Sister Cecilia, busying herself with the teapot, proceeded to blow her own trumpet with the bare-facedness of true virtue.

"I have been with her constantly," she said. "I think it is better for us all to tell of our grief; I think that we are given speech for that purpose. For although one may only be able to offer sympathy and perhaps a little advice, it is always a relief to speak of one's sorrow."

"I suppose it is," admitted Dora from her strong-hold of reserve, "for some people."

"Oh, yes!" exclaimed Sister Cecilia, all heedless of the sarcasm. For extreme charity is proof against such. It covers other things besides a mult.i.tude of sins. Wielded foolishly it runs amuck like a too luxuriant creeper, and often kills commonsense. "And that is why I asked you to come, dear. I thought that you might want to confide in some one--that you might want to unburden your heart to one who feels for you as if this sorrow were her own--"

"Only one piece of sugar, thank you," interrupted Dora. "Thank you. No.

Bread and b.u.t.ter, please. It is very kind of you, Sister Cecilia. But, you see, when I have any unburdening to do there is always mother, and if I want any advice there is always father."

"Yes, dear. But sometimes even one's parents are not quite the persons to whom one would turn in times of grief."

"Oh!" observed Dora, without much enthusiasm.

Unconsciously Sister Cecilia was doing the very best thing possible for Dora, She was arousing in her the spirit of antagonism--hardening a stricken heart, as it were, by a fresh challenge. She was teaching Dora to fight for what we learn to deem most sacred--namely, the right to monopolise our own thoughts and feelings. Sister Cecilia is not, one may a.s.sume, the only good woman in the world who cannot draw a definite line between sympathy and mere curiosity. With many the display of sympathy is nothing but a half-conscious bait to attract a shoal of further details.

Self-reliance was lurking somewhere in this girl's character, but it had never been developed by the pressure of circ.u.mstances. Reserve she had seen practised by her father, but the actual advantages thereof were only now beginning to be apparent to her. The body, we are told, adapts itself to abnormal circ.u.mstances; so is it with the mind. Already Dora was beginning, as they say at sea, to find her feet; to take that stand amidst her environments which she was forced to hold, practically alone, thereafter.

And Sister Cecilia, with that blind faith in a good motive which gives almost as much trouble as actual vice, floundered on in the path she had mapped out for herself.

"You know, dear," she said, looking out of the window with a sentimental droop of her thin, inquisitive lips, "I cannot help feeling that this--this terrible blow means more to you than it does to us."

"Why?" inquired Dora practically.

Sister Cecilia was silent, with one of those aggravating silences which do not allow even the satisfaction of a flat contradiction. A meaning silence is a coward's argument. She was beginning to feel slightly nervous before this child, ignorant that childhood is not always a matter of years and calendar months.

"Why?" asked Dora again.

Sister Cecilia looked rather bewildered.

"Well, dear, I thought perhaps--I always thought that my poor boy entertained some feeling--you understand?"

"No," replied Dora, borrowing for the moment her father's most crushing deliberation of manner, "I cannot say I do. When you say your 'poor boy,'

are you referring to Jem?"

Sister Cecilia a.s.sented with a resigned nod worthy of the very earliest martyr.

"Then, as every one has discovered so many virtues in him--quite suddenly--we had better emulate one of them, and have at the least the good feeling to hold our tongues about any feelings he may have entertained. Do you not think so, Sister Cecilia?"

"Well, dear, I only thought to act as might be best for you," said the well-intentioned meddler, with the drawl of the professionally misunderstood.

"I have no doubt of that," returned Dora, with an equanimity which was again strangely suggestive of Jem Agar. "But in future you will be consulting my welfare much more effectively by refraining from action on my behalf at all."

"As you will, dear; as you will," in the hopeless tone of age, experience, and wisdom forced to stand idle while youth and folly rush headlong down the hill.

"Yes," returned Dora calmly; "I know that, thank you. And now, I think, we had better change the subject."

The subject was therefore changed; but Sister Cecilia, having, as it were, whetted her appet.i.te for details, was not at her ease with other food for the mind, and presently Dora left.

The girl went back into her small world with a new knowledge gained--the knowledge that in all and through all we are really quite alone. There can be only one companion, and if that one be absent, there are only so many talking-machines left to us. And many of us pa.s.s the whole of our lives in conversation with them. So it is; and we know not why.

In a subtle way she felt stronger for this little tussle--a fight is always exhilarating. She felt that from henceforth the memory of Jem was hers, and hers alone, to defend and to cherish. It was not much of a consolation. No. But then this is a world of small mercies, where some of us get an hour or some mean portion of a day when we want a lifetime.

CHAPTER XV

THE TOUCH OF NATURE

A sense, when first I fronted him, Said, "Trust him not!"

After successfully carrying through the purchase of mourning stationery and attending to other important items connected with sorrow in its worldly shape, Arthur Agar went back to Cambridge. There was enough of the woman in his nature to enable him to cherish grief and nurse it lovingly, as some women (not the best of them) do. In this att.i.tude towards the world there was none of that dogged going about his business which characterises the ordinary man from whose life something has slipped out.

He wandered by the banks of the Cam with mourning in his mien, and his cherished friends took sympathetic coffee with him after Hall. They spoke of Jem with that fervid admiration which University men honestly feel for one a few years their senior who has already "done something."

"A ripping soldier" they called him and some of them entertained serious doubts as to whether they had done wisely in choosing the less glorious paths of peace. And Arthur Agar settled down into the old profitless life, with this difference--that he could not dine out, that he used blackedged notepaper, and that his delicate heliotrope neckties were folded away in a drawer until such time as his grief should be a.s.suaged into that state of resignation technically called half-mourning.

One afternoon well towards the end of the term Arthur Agar's "gyp" crept in with that valet-like confidential air which seems to be bred of too intimate a knowledge of the extent of one's wardrobe.

"There is a gentleman, sir," he said, "as wants to see you. But in no wise will he give his name, which, he says, you don't know it."

"Is he selling engravings?" asked Arthur.

The "gyp" looked mildly offended. As if he didn't know that sort!

"No, sir. Military man, I should take it."