The familiar words of the service, the odour of
the incense, brought back the old time--the unforgotten atmosphere, the
dull tranquillity of ten years, which had been as one year by reason of
their level monotony.
Could she go back to such a life as that? Go back! Leave all she loved? At
the mere suggestion her trembling hand was stretched out involuntarily to
clasp her niece Henriette, kneeling beside her. Leave them--leave those
with whom and for whom she lived? Leave this loving child--her sister--her
brother? Fareham had told her to call him "Brother." He had been to her as
a brother, with all a brother's kindness, counselling her, confiding in
her.
Only with one person at Chilton Abbey had she ever conversed as seriously
as with Fareham, and that person was Sir Denzil Warner, who at five and
twenty was more serious in his way of looking at serious things than most
men of fifty.
"I cannot make a jest of life," he said once, in reply to some flippant
speech of De Malfort's; "it is too painful a business for the majority."
"What has that to do with us--the minority? Can we smooth a sick man's
pillow by pulling a long face? We shall do him more good by tossing him a
crown, if he be poor; or helping to build him a hospital by the sacrifice
of a night's winnings at ombre.
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