‘You will have a cup of tea, sir,’ said Mrs. Sandford. ‘Oh! dear, yes, we’ve had our tea a long while ago, but it is just a pleasure and a pride to have some made fresh for you; and though we don’t live in that way ourselves I know many that do. We understand the habits of gentlepeople, even though we may not be gentlefolks ourselves.’ ‘That I am sure you are,’ said the curate, ‘in the truest sense of the word.’ ‘Oh! well, sir, it’s very good of you to say it, and I hope we’re not rude or rough,’ said the old lady, and she bustled out of the room to look after the tea, which he did not at all care for, with great satisfaction in being able thus to leave the room for a moment. Her husband plunged into parish talk with Mr. Cattley with not less relief. ‘Thank God, that’s got over,’ he said to himself. As for John, he was very glad to see his tutor also, but without any of their special thankfulness. He did not take much part in the conversation, which was natural. At his age a boy is expected not to put himself forward. He sat and listened, and through it all would now and then feel a bitter throb of wonder and pain go through him. Dead! He might have known it all the time. Papa, so kind as he was, would never have left him so long without finding him out, without coming to see him, even if, as he had sometimes fancied, the grandparents did not approve. And so he was dead! gone, never to be seen more. It was so long, so long since there had been any reality in the relationship that the boy could not grieve as he would have done had he lost anyone he knew and loved. It was only a shadow he had lost, and, indeed, he had not lost that, it was with him just the same as before. And, as a matter of fact, he had never thought of any meeting again. The shock he had received was more a kind of awe of dying, a kind of ache at the thought that his fond recollections had been, as it were, vain all this long time. He listened to the conversation, and even would put in a word or two, and smile at what grandfather or Mr. Cattley said. And then the thought, the throb would again dart through him: dead! It was a strange thing to feel that some one belonging to him had actually gone over that bourne from which no traveller returns. This was so solemn, and John’s recollection was so far from solemn; and he knew that the gayest, the most light-hearted had to die all the same, like the gravest. But to think that some one belonging to him had stepped across that dark line of separation, that some one might be thinking about him upon the other side, beyond the grave. This made John’s nerves tingle, and a shiver passed under his hair. Dead! it is so strange when one is young to realise, though it is, no doubt, common to all, yet that one individual known to one’s self should die.