She had felt a great shock, a great horror, at the fate of her father, but she could not feel sorrow, such as the affections feel at death. It was unspeakably terrible that he should have died like this, without a moment of preparation, without a single word or glance to reconcile him with the humanity which he had outraged, but this was all that she could feel. Between her and her father there had always been in life an impassable gulf; death could not bridge that gulf. “Am I made of stone?” she said to herself in remorse; but it was of no use; she felt horror, but sorrow she could not feel. She was too sincere to pretend it to herself or others. She seemed to her mother, to the household, to the official persons who came in contact with her, unnaturally chill and silent; they thought it the coldness of indifference. The grief of Margaret Massarene was violent and genuine, but its safety-valve was in its hysterical garrulity. She suffered extremely, for she had loved her husband despite his brutality, and had honored him despite all his faults. She had always believed in him with a pathetic devotion which no ill-treatment changed. “He was a great man, was William,” she said again and again between her convulsive sobs, as she sat by the bed on which his body had been laid after the autopsy. “He was a great man, and God knows what heights he wouldn’t have riz to if he’d lived a few years longer. For he’d took the measure of ’em all. He said he’d die a peer, and he would have died a peer if this cruel bullet hadn’t cut him down like a bison on the plains. Lord, to think of all he had gone through by flood and by fire, in storm and in quarrel, by the hand of God and by the hand of man; and when he comes here to enjoy his own and get his just reward, he is struck just like any poor Texan steer pithed in the slaughter place! The ways o’ the Almighty are past finding out indeed.” Then she took his dead hand between both her own and held it tenderly and kissed it. His princes and his lords, his fine ladies and fair favorites, were all far away from him now; he was all her own in his dead loneliness; her own man as he had been when they had walked across the green fields of Kilrathy on their marriage-day, with all their worldly goods put up in a bundle hung upon a stick. In her grief and her despair there was a thrill of jealous joy; he was once again all her own as he had been on that soft wet midsummer morning when they had walked through the grass man and wife. CHAPTER XXXII. “We’ll give him the grandest buryin’ that money can get,” she said to her daughter.