Miss McCroke drew up the blind, and stirred the fire.
He paced the room while she was gone, full of sadness. He had been very fond of the Squire, and that awfully sudden death, an apopleptic seizure, instantaneous as a thunderbolt, had impressed him very painfully. It was his first experience of the kind, and it was infinitely terrible to him. It seemed to him a long time before Vixen appeared, and then the door opened, and a slim black figure came in, a white fixed face looked at him piteously, with tearless eyes made big by a great grief. She came leaning on Miss McCroke, as if she could hardly walk unaided. The face was stranger to him than an altogether unknown face. It was Violet Tempest with all the vivid joyous life gone out of her, like a lamp that is extinguished.
He took her cold trembling hands and drew her gently to a chair, and sat down beside her.
"I wanted so much to see you, dear," he said, "to tell you how sorry we all are for you--my mother, my aunt, and cousin"--Violet gave a faint shiver--"all of us. The Duke liked your dear father so much. It was quite a shock to him."
"You are very good," Violet said mechanically.
She sat by him, pale and still as marble, looking at the ground. His voice and presence impressed her but faintly, like something a long way off. She was thinking of her dead father. She saw nothing but that one awful figure. They had laid him in his grave by this time. The cold cruel earth had fallen upon him and hidden him for ever from the light; he was shut away for ever from the fair glad world; he who had been so bright and cheerful, whose presence had carried gladness everywhere.
"Is the funeral quite over?" she asked presently, without lifting her heavy eyelids.
"Yes, dear. It was a noble funeral. Everybody was there--rich and poor. Everybody loved him."
"The poor most of all," she said. "I know how good he was to them."
Somebody knocked at the door and asked something of Miss McCroke, which obliged the governess to leave her pupil. Roderick was glad at her departure, That substantial figure in its new black dress had been a hinderance to freedom of conversation.
Miss McCroke's absence did not loosen Violet's tongue. She sat looking at the ground, and was dumb. That silent grief was very awful to Roderick.