And amid all this horror and dreariness which clung round the place, the dead man lay in his coffin in the dismal room he had occupied during life. No flowers were placed on the bed or on the coffin, no relatives wept over the white set face to melt its frozen apathy with hot tears, no voice of lamentation was heard bewailing a good man's fate; lonely in death as he had been in life, Randal Garsworth, who had sacrificed the pleasures of this earth to a delusion, lay unloved and uncared for in the silent room as if he had lain for generations in the vault of his ancestors.
Sometimes when Munks or Jellicks had taken their turns in watching the body, Patience would come for a time and, kneeling down, pray for the dead man's soul; but the sneering look on the still countenance seemed to mock her prayers and she fled away in horror at the thoughts that gibing smile provoked.
On the second day after the death of the squire, a visitor came to see Patience, one whom she half expected, and the housekeeper was not at all astonished at beholding Beaumont standing at the door of her room, about four o'clock in the afternoon.
"Why do you come here?" she asked half in anger, half in dread.
"Because I want to speak to you," replied Beaumont, leisurely closing the door and taking a seat. "I know it is not quite the thing to pay visits so soon after a death, but Miss Challoner and her aunt are, I believe shut up in their rooms, Munks and that serpent you call Jellicks are safe in the kitchen, so I came in at the back of the house quite unperceived to see you."
"I think you can pretty well guess," he replied coolly, "about the conversation I had with you the other day--I want your answer."
"Is it, indeed--ah! we'd better chat over it for a time. I may persuade you to change your mind."
"You'll never do that," she said with a kind of gloomy triumph, "never."
"Indeed--we'll see," he retorted calmly; "by-the-way I hope you don't mind me smoking, but it is so deucedly shivery in this tomb of a house that it gives me the creeps."
"Thanks--you know I love my creature comforts."
He rolled himself a cigarette, lighted it, and then blowing a thin cloud of blue smoke, crossed his legs and looked complacently at her.