Ivo did not answer. He could not.
"Last night," she went on carefully, "after you'd gone—he was very angry. Not with you. With himself. He said he had handled it like a fool, that he had meant to say something quite different and the words came out sideways, as they did with him at the end. He asked me to write to you at the inn. He was going to dictate it in the morning." She drew a breath. "Then about one o'clock he couldn't get his breath, and I sent for Dr. Corbould, and Corbould came, and there wasn't anything to be done."
"You were with him."
"Mrs. Allard and I. And Pask." She looked down at the old man's face. "He wasn't frightened. He held my hand and complained that it was cold. Then he asked about you, and I lied, and he said 'Good,' and that was all."
Ivo looked at her across the bed: the narrow white face, the eyes that would not let themselves weep in front of him, the signet ring still clenched in her left fist where it had been since the altar, so that the knuckles had gone white around it.
"You can let go of the ring," he said. "It's quite safe. I'll have it made smaller."
She looked down at her hand as though she had never seen it before. Slowly she opened it. The ring had left a deep red print of the boar in her palm through the glove.
VI.
For two days it rained.
It came in off the Wash on a north-east wind, fine and grey and endless, and the fen soaked it up and darkened and began, here and there, to shine. The river beyond the Barrier Bank rose a foot, then two. Ivo walked out on the morning of the second day and stood on the bank top and looked at it—brown, fast, turbid, carrying sedge and fence-rails and once a drowned ewe, running high and quiet between its banks a full eight feet above the level of the black fields on the other side. He had seen water like that in Spain. He did not like it.
In the house they lived like two guests who had been put in the same inn by mistake. He took the old man's study, because the steward needed someone to tell things to; she kept to the library, where she had always worked, and he heard her through the wall at all hours, the scratch of a pen and the rattle of the fire-irons and, once, very late, a sound that might have been weeping and might have been the wind. They dined together, because Mrs. Allard expected it, at either end of a table that would have seated thirty, and spoke about the funeral arrangements, which were to be on the Tuesday, and about the hatchment, and the rain. She called him Your Grace. He did not know what to call her, and so avoided calling her anything.