'I think you told me it
was three or four generations ago that your family branched off
from the Luxellians?'
'She was my grandmother,' said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to
moisten her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the
conscience-stricken look of Guido's Magdalen, rendered upon a more
childlike form. She kept her face partially away from Knight and
Stephen, and set her eyes upon the sky visible outside, as if her
salvation depended upon quickly reaching it. Her left hand rested
lightly within Knight's arm, half withdrawn, from a sense of shame
at claiming him before her old lover, yet unwilling to renounce
him; so that her glove merely touched his sleeve. '"Can one be
pardoned, and retain the offence?"' quoted Elfride's heart then.
Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on
in the shape of disjointed remarks. 'One's mind gets thronged
with thoughts while standing so solemnly here,' Knight said, in a
measured quiet voice. 'How much has been said on death from time
to time! how much we ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy
each of these who lie here saying:
'For Thou, to make my fall more great,
Didst lift me up on high.'
What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am
thinking of.'
'Yes, I know it,' she murmured, and went on in a still lower
voice, seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of
her nature to reach Stephen:
'"My days, just hastening to their end,
Are like an evening shade;
My beauty doth, like wither'd grass,
With waning lustre fade.
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