CHAPTER V.

MORS JANUA:

SHOCKED to find how late it was when she

awoke, Patricia hurried over her dressing, afraid of having kept her uncle waiting for breakfast; which was one of the domestic offences he found it

hard to forgive. The temper of the commander still clung to him, and with the kindest heart in the world he had one of the tightest hands when he exercised any discipline at all. He was always captain in his own ship, he used to say, and always intended to be; and if his laws were few they were positive.

Patricia, however, was needlessly alarmed. When she got down-stairs full an hour after her usual time, she found that her uncle had not yet risen. She was glad of this as it enabled her to help Sarah with the breakfast; and with a womanly instinct of the right sort she took pains to make it a breakfast of

special pleasantness, in reference to her uncle's fatigue and seizure of the night before. But though it took rather a long time to get ready, still the Captain, usually so punctual and so early, was not astir.

She went up to his room and knocked at the door. There was no answer. She knocked again; still no answer. Again and again; each time louder than before, as the imperiousness of fear made itself felt. And then, holding her breath for she knew not what unspoken dread, she opened the door and went in.

On the bed lay the old man still in the wet clothes of the evening before. He had evidently flung himself there, weary and exhausted, when Gordon had left him; and so had fallen asleep. Asleep? Was that white face sleeping? When she took his hand, and it hung so coldly strange and still in hers-when she kissed his face and found that so cold too, so rigid underneath the skin, the glassy eyes not quite closed, the mouth opened, the jaw dropped-was that sleep? Was it not rather the thing she had seen only a day ago? It was Death; and she knew it.

Soon the servant came hurrying up to her loud call; and then the doctor from St. John's, who happened to be passing through the village at the

moment, was brought in; and in less than ten minutes the house down-stairs was thronged with eager questioners crowding up to hear the news, which had spread as if the birds of the air had carried it, confirmed at the fountain head. It was like a social earthquake in the village; and even brave men felt scared when they saw the cottage flag floating half-mast high-the coast-guardsman who came in had done that; it would have been shameful and indelicate else, as bad as a piano playing, or the first Sunday at church in bright colours and heard that the fine old captain who was like a father in the place, had been found dead in his bed-God save his soul alive!-and that a life which looked as if it had had many years yet to run was cut short just when it was most wanted. For the fate of the poor fatherless and motherless girl, whom they had seen grow up among them like one of their own, touched them all with pity; and many a man's eyes were moist that day, and many a woman felt her mother's heart ache with pain, for the bright and friendly "maid" who had always been the first to lend a helping hand when a neighbour was down; but who now wanted a stronger hand to help her than any to be found in Barsands.

Whether she was pitied or deserted Patricia neither knew nor for the moment cared. She would not leave the room where her dead uncle lay, and she would not let go his hand. She did not speak nor cry nor stir, but stood quite still with a dazed kind of air, looking at him. Only once, when the doctor handled him as she thought roughly, she put her arms over him in the manner of protection, saying, "Don't do that-you will hurt him."

She could not realise the fact that this body, this person of the one she had loved so tenderly and lived with so long, was no more now than the stones in the fields or the wood in the forest. She was intellectually conscious that he was dead, but she had still the feeling that he felt and saw and understood, though he was not able to speak to her, and that she must take care of him against those who did not love him as she loved him. But indeed she had not much conscious thought of any kind. She had only a general sense of darkness and a dull kind of pain, mixed up with a mocking and incongruous activity of eyesight that seemed half sacrilegious, as when she found herself counting the worn buttons of his waistcoat and the stripes on his grey flannel shirt.

The doctor spoke to her, and tried to reason with her; but though she heard his voice clearly enough, she did not understand what he said. She wondered why he talked to her, and she wished he would leave off; but outwardly she was patient, and at one time he thought he was doing her good. Knowing his profession, he did not like that tearless, half-bewildered and half-stony look she had. If she had shrieked and sobbed, and been even petulant and unreasonable, he would have understood it better; but this silent tenacity had an ugly look of pressure, and he wanted to rouse her out of it.

Presently, in the midst of his talk, Gordon Frere, pale and breathless, came rushing through the garden and up into into the room where Patricia was standing, still keeping guard over the dead.

The news had met him as he came in from St. John's, and half-a-dozen people had stopped him in the village to repeat it.

"Patricia!" he said, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

His voice seemed to break the spell. She turned hastily and held out her hand.

"Oh, Gordon, how glad I am you have come!