The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight, before anyone moved in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the early light, half asleep with its blinds down.
At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking, with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously old, and from the way in which she stood, a little hunched together and very massive, you could see what she would be like when she was really old, how she would sit day after day in her chair looking placidly in front of her. Other people began to come into the room, and to pass her, but she did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at last, as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair, and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her to live. She turned her hands over and over in her lap and looked at them curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work for her. There did not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course one went on. … She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside her, with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she were about to ask a question.
Miss Allan anticipated her.
“Yes,” she said. “She died this morning, very early, about three o’clock.”
Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which was now laid with great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless, casual groups of people who were standing beside the solid armchairs and tables. They looked to her unreal, or as people look who remain unconscious that some great explosion is about to take place beside them. But there was no explosion, and they went on standing by the chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but, penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw the house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and the figure of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets. She could almost see the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the mourners.
“They expected it?” she asked at length.
Miss Allan could only shake her head.
“I know nothing,” she replied, “except what Mrs. Flushing’s maid told me. She died early this morning.”
The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what, Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the passages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself. Housemaids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn stopped her. It was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she looked at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed themselves at last among Evelyn’s sobs. “It was wicked,” she sobbed, “it was cruel—they were so happy.”
Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
“It seems hard—very hard,” she said. She paused and looked out over the slope of the hill at the Ambroses’ villa; the windows were blazing in the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from those windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her strangely empty.
“And yet the older one grows,” she continued, her eyes regaining more than their usual brightness, “the more certain one becomes that there is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?” she asked.
She asked the question of someone, but she did not ask it of Evelyn. Evelyn’s sobs were becoming quieter. “There must be a reason,” she said. “It can’t only be an accident. For it was an accident—it need never have happened.”
Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
“But we must not let ourselves think of that,” she added, “and let us hope that they don’t either. Whatever they had done it might have been the same. These terrible illnesses—”
“There’s no reason—I don’t believe there’s any reason at all!” Evelyn broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back with a little snap.
“Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly believe,” she went on, lowering her voice slightly, “that Rachel’s in Heaven, but Terence. …”
“What’s the good of it all?” she demanded.
Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing Evelyn’s hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to hear, she was making her way to the Flushings’ room. As she opened their door she felt that she had interrupted some argument between husband and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light, and Mr. Flushing was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade her of something.
“Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury,” he
