There is something so awful in the muteness of her despair, that a curious hush falls upon those grouped around her--and him. The whole scene is so fraught with a weird horror, that when one woman in the background bursts into bitter weeping, she is pushed out of sight, as though emotion of a demonstrative nature is out of place just here. Noisy grief can have no part in this hopeless sorrow. Dicky Browne, bending over her (Roger has taken Dulce home), says: "Oh, Portia! that it should end like this, and just now--_now_, when life had opened out afresh for him!" His voice is choked and almost inaudible. Now that he is gone, they all know how dear he has been to them, how interwoven with theirs has been his quiet melancholy life. "I knew it," says Portia, not quickly, but yet with some faint, soft vehemence. "I am not surprised, I am not grieved." She whispers something else after this repeatedly, and Dicky, bending lower, hears the words, "And soon--and soon." She repeats them in an ecstatic undertone; there is joy and an odd _certainty_ in it. They are the last words she ever spoke to _him_. "He is very cold," she says then, with a little shiver. Sir Mark, seeing the tears are running down Dicky's cheeks and that he is incapable of saying anything further, pushes him gently to one side, and murmurs something in Portia's ear. She seems quite willing to do anything they may desire. "Yes, yes. He must come home. It will be better. I will come home with him." And then with a long-drawn sigh, "Poor Uncle Christopher!" This is the last time her thoughts ever wander away from her dead love. "It will be well to take him away from the cruel sea," she says, lifting her eyes to the rough but kindly faces of the boatmen who surround her. "But," piteously, "oh! do not _hurt_ him!" "Never fear, missy," says one old sailor, in a broken voice; and a young fellow, turning aside, whispers to a comrade that he was "her man" in tones of heartfelt pity. Still keeping his head within her arms, she rises slowly to her knees, and then the men, careful to humor her, so lift the body that she--even when she has gained her feet--has still this dear burden in her keeping. At the very last, when they have laid him upon the rude bier they have constructed for him in a hurry, she still hesitates, and regards with anguish the hard spot where she must lay her burden down.