The house
was perfectly quiet. Dinner had been cleared away already through the
hatch into the kitchen passage, and the servants' quarters were on the
other side of the house. No sound of any kind came from the
smoking-room; not even the faint whiff of tobacco-smoke that had a way
of stealing out when Laurie was smoking really seriously within.
She did not know why, she had stopped there, half-way down the stairs.
She had dined from a tray in her own room, as she had said; and had
been there alone ever since, for the most part at her _prie-Dieu_, in
dead silence, conscious of nothing connected, listening to the
occasional tread of a maid in the hall beneath, passing to and from
the dining-room. There she had tried to face the ordeal that was
coming--the ordeal, at the nature of which even now she only half
guessed, and she had realized nothing, formed no plan, considered no
eventuality. Things were so wholly out of her experience that she had
no process whereby to deal with them. Just two words came over and
over again before her consciousness--Courage and Love.
She looked again at the door.
Laurie was there, she said. Then she questioned herself. Was it
Laurie.
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