long look at that aloof old face, which indeed had always looked kindly on her. Shrewd as old Adeline had been, Alayne felt sure that she had never guessed that she had ceased to love Eden, any more than she could be convinced that she was not an American heiress.
Alayne had left the house in a mood of deep depression. She had felt, not the aversion of a sensitive animal from the presence of death, as Renny had, but a profound shrinking from the mourning of the inanimate Jalna. It had seemed to her that the solid walls had drawn nearer to enclose that body, that the ceiling had lowered to shelter it, that the very doors had narrowed to delay its passage from thence. . . . Leaving, she had looked back at it from the edge of the lawn, and it seemed to her that the whole house had shrunken into itself with grief!
After the chief mourners there followed the friends of the family, and many people from the surrounding villages and countryside in motors and old-fashioned buggies, a long procession. Here was the funeral of one whom the oldest of them could remember, from their earliest days, as a married woman. A landmark was gone. Not a tree, not the steeple of a church, but a living, dominating being! Many of the mourners had not seen her for years, but her tall form, her rust-red hair, her piercing brown eyes, were impressed on their memories for ever. Every now and again some story of her temper or her idiosyncrasies would float about. To-day it was remembered how until the last year she had never—or almost never—missed a morning service in the grey stone church built by Captain Whiteoak, driving there in her shabby phaeton behind the two stout bays. And, though she might have been close-fisted enough in some ways, she had each Christmas given a present to every child in her own village of Evandale, built on what was once part of the estate of Jalna. In her last years she had depended on Ernest to buy these presents for her. Next Christmas the children would miss that.
So, though she had been almost as immovable as a
