“Is this the way you treat your visitors, coming in at this hour of the morning?” said Miss Jean, “and with so little regard to what folk may think? Let the young man bide below till I’m out of the way. I’ll see you to your room, Marjory. You want some woman-person to see after you, and that taupie of a maid is snoring, disturbing my slumbers for hours past.” “I am sorry you waited for me,” Marjory said in her strange stupor, “but when you know the cause--” “Oh, ay, I know the cause,” said Miss Jean, throwing a jealous glance over her shoulder at Fanshawe, who hesitated and lingered on the stairs. “I know the cause,” she repeated, following Marjory into her room and closing the door with much severity, “but for my part I’m a great deal more interested, to tell the truth, in what may be the result.” Thus with one consent the elder members of the party--the ones who had lived longest and were nearest the ending--thrust the death-scene away from them, and went on with the threads of life as if there had been no interruption of its ordinary course. This was what they cared for--the living, not the dead. And Fanshawe, dazed too with his watching, with his strange long walk through the unnatural yet fresh and lovely morning, which had seemed to spy upon them all the way, with wondering looks, like a child, went into the room prepared for him--having added that picture of Miss Jean in her dressing-gown to all the others, of which his mind was full. He did not hear what she said, but he made out her sharp look of disapproval, and the jealousy of her watch over Marjory, thus peremptorily parted from him, and taken out of his keeping the moment she crossed the threshold. She had been so absolutely confided to him before, that the contrast was all the more remarkable. When he was safe in his room, the ludicrousness of the old lady’s appearance came before him so strongly, that he laughed in spite of himself--and then was intensely ashamed of himself, and crept to bed, feeling guilty in the daylight, feeling as if he had been doing something he ought not to have done. How strange to glide into the stillness of an orderly sleeping-room after an exciting night! And he was dizzy with his journey, with fatigue, and long waking. But still, of all the memories of the night, Miss Jean at the top of the stairs was the one that lingered most in his memory. He dreamed of her, and laughed in his sleep, and woke with a half-hysterical mixture of laughter and emotion, as much moved by that momentary comic glimpse as by all that had happened. But this levity, fortunately, nobody knew. CHAPTER XXI.