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He had spoken with intention, and now his deliberate glance dropped to the level of the strip of sandy shore beside the river, where the giant Convent kettle boiled upon a disproportionately little fire, and Sister Hilda-Antony presided in the Reverend Mother's place at the trestle-supported tray where the Britannia-metal teapot brooded, as doth the large domestic hen, over an immense family of cups and saucers.
Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words. "The last charge the Mother laid on us Sister Hilda-Antony and me was to keep our eyes upon the child. The very day it was done she told us, and I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her eyes."
I am hungry enough to be interested even in minced mule and spatch-cocked locusts, after all this. Good-night! I must kiss you again, child! I hope you don't mind?" Lynette gave her cheek, asking: "Where is the Mother?" The voice of Sister Tobias answered out of the purplish darkness: "She has gone on with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophée, dearie.
"And Sister Hilda-Antony and me had the world's work with all the people who stopped us in the street and came round us at the Institute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone plopped in a duckpond! You'd have thought by the crazy way folks carried on that two pretty young people had never went and got engaged before." Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech.
She dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before she took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette with us. There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she remembered her name?"
"The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the Convent. Both me and Sister Hilda-Antony felt there was a strange and awful stillness and solemnness about the place. At last me and her told the child that go we must. We'd wait no longer. But she, knowing we'd never leave without her, ran upstairs. We heard her light feet going over the wet matting and down the long passage to the chapel door.
She did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital next day, but secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and not once to let her out of sight. This done, she knew herself impotently helpless to do more. This strong and salient woman, lapped in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that tightened every hour, was waxing weak.
Do what he would to keep them free, his eyes were dimmed and blinded, and Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the blue cotton handkerchief. "We thought the young gentleman would be waiting near the Convent," said Sister Tobias, "or in one of the ground-floor rooms, but he wasn't there. Me and Sister Hilda-Antony looked at one another.
Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence, suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned between. She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophée. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart she hid it near.
There was a girl in white, for she would not let the Sisters put black garments on her, kneeling between Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony. This girl did not weep at all. Chief mourner at both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact.
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