"At the end of the passage in what we call the store-room. They've put a bed for me there. Theresa, you are not blaming me?" "How could I?" "Do you think he understood?" "I know he did," she said firmly. "Then why----" Again there came the questioning and again her words outran the answer. "I'll tell you in the morning--in the sunlight, please." "You know?" She nodded. "In the morning, then. Good-night." He lighted her to her bedroom door but when she had shut it and heard him go down the stairs she wished the house were not quite so still, and with the wish she heard a low, shuddering moan, and then another. That was Clara Rutherford crying for her dead. She undressed with fumbling, nervous fingers, and, stealing into bed, she covered her ears to shut out the dreadful quiet punctuated by that sound, yet she sat up again, compelled to listen while, with a regular insistence, the moaning invaded the night. A little later there came a stealthy, bumping sound along the passage, and she was ready to leap out and bolt her door, when Alexander's voice came low and clear. "It's me, Theresa. I'm sleeping just outside your door." "Oh, is it you?" she cried. "You won't be lonely now?" "Oh no, I won't be lonely." "You must go to sleep." But she did not try to do that. She lay awake for the joy of being near him. CHAPTER XXX Theresa had slept at last, but she had waked often out of dreadful dreams and lain in a sweat of terror in spite of Alexander's nearness, and so her mind had passed to picturing the manner of her father's death. She saw it as a confusion of noise, and smoke, and fallen bodies; she heard his last three piteous words, and felt strength fading from her as it must have dropped from him, and the stern beauty of death was lost in the welter she made of it. She rose more wearied than she had gone to bed and had a white and hollow face for Janet and Alexander when she descended to the kitchen. She had gone down with no thought about herself, but when she looked at Alexander a trembling shyness took her. Through the kitchen door the sun came strongly, and the smell of the larches was blown in. She hardly knew what she did as she stepped across the threshold and held her palms upwards to the clean air; whether she went for cleansing from the night or for refuge from Alexander, she did not know nor did she question; she knew only that for the first time, and in the house where her father and his were lying dead, Alexander's presence shook her like a wind. But she had always loved the wind and she had courage, and her shadowed eyes were steady when she sat opposite to him at table, with a sunbeam shining on his head and hers, joining them as by a bar.