I believe I’m—awfully ill! I can’t see straight. Can’t think.”

He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him.

“Don’t, Rob, don’t!” she cried in actual anguish. “Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I’m going to wear—” She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. “Oh! do try to sit up,” she begged pathetically. “Just try. don’t give up till afterwards.” But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible.

It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa.

He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless.

“Have you sent for a doctor?” he inquired.

“He’s—only just done it!” she exclaimed. “It’s more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and—”

“Were you thinking of going?” he put it to her quietly.

“I shall have to send for a nurse of course—” she began. He went so far as to interrupt her.

“You had better not go—if you’ll pardon my saying so,” he suggested.

“Not go? Not go at all?” she wailed.

“Not go at all,” was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs.

In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child.

Chapter 3

Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that “poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless” and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl—left with no income! How very sad! What could she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested “the Scriptures” as suitable reading. Some of them—rare and strange souls even in their time—would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable.

But to Feather’s immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase—tucked against a wall—one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried—dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first—but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst—to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it.

Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards “with sympathy” had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard—no one going up and down stairs—Rob’s room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty—the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant.