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'When this is over, she thought, 'I will ring and have the fire lighted. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and calculated deliberately how long the paroxysm would probably last. She had always regarded pain as an animate thing which had to be fought with, and she had never failed in courage when she met it, nor moaned when, as now for the first time, she was beaten by it.
He rose from his knees, and walked slowly across to the mantelpiece, where he stood abstractedly fingering the ornaments, and straightening them a trick of his when he was agitated.
Makebelieve called to mind the different ornaments which stood on the parlor mantelpiece and on the top of the piano. There was a china shepherdess with a basket of flowers at one end of the mantelpiece and an exact duplicate on the other.
He tarried in his room till the second bell summoned him to descend; and then, entering the drawing-room, which had a cold look even in July, found his uncle standing by the mantelpiece, and a young, slight, handsome woman, half-buried in a huge but not comfortable /fauteuil/. "Your aunt, Mrs. Templeton; madam, my nephew, Mr. Lumley Ferrers," said Templeton, with a wave of the hand.
At the word "go!" they scuttled away, and hunted eagerly, now and then stooping to pick up a pin from the floor, or reaching up to get a horseshoe from the mantelpiece. The rooms had been literally sown with the small objects; the clovers and horseshoes being cut from pasteboard and painted, and the black cats being tiny china, wooden, or bronze affairs.
The little model gave him a look with who-knows-what of reproach in it, and, faithful to her training, went submissively away. Hilary did not look after her, but, standing by the lofty mantelpiece above the ashes of the fire, rested his forehead on his arm. Not even a fly's buzzing broke the stillness. There was sound for all that-not of distant music, but of blood beating in his ears and temples.
"Couldn't you find room enough without them?" she inquired while her gaze left the mattress and travelled dubiously to the mantelpiece. "It seems a pity for you to go to any expense about shelves, doesn't it?" "Oh, they won't cost much. I'll do the work myself, and I'll do it in the mornings when it won't disturb anybody. I daresay I'll have to push that bed around a bit in order to make space."
Everything was as she had always seen it, from the ugly Satsuma vases flanking the ugly bronze clock on the mantelpiece, to the sheaf of pink roses lying beside her in their white paper wrappings. Even Miss Harriet Robinson's choice of welcoming flowers was the same.
He laid his hand with a firm grip on her shoulder, turned her round, and pushed her slowly before him along the passage and through the dining-room door, which stood open on their left hand. There was a portrait of Janet's mother, a grey-haired, dark-eyed old woman, in a neatly fluted cap, hanging over the mantelpiece.
He was now prepared to listen to what Sir Charles had to say and to judge impartially of its evidential value. Wandering from side to side of the library, he presently found himself standing still before the mantelpiece and studying a photograph in a silver frame which occupied the centre of the shelf.
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