The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there was a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table.  The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the day.  Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother’s room with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.

I pulled the paper out of my pocket.  I did not imagine that a number of the Standard could have the effect of Medusa’s head.  Her face went stony in a moment—­her eyes—­her limbs.  The most terrible thing was that being stony she remained alive.  One was conscious of her palpitating heart.  I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy circumlocution.  It was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so still from head to foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard her draw a breath.  As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and affected the firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to have given way.  She was frightfully altered.  She looked aged—­ruined.  But only for a moment.  She said with decision—­

“I am going to tell my mother at once.”

“Would that be safe in her state?” I objected.

“What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month?  We understand this in another way.  The crime is not at his door.  Don’t imagine I am defending him before you.”

She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur not to go till she returned.  For twenty interminable minutes not a sound reached me.  At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with her quick light step.  When she reached the armchair she dropped into it heavily as if completely exhausted.

Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear.  She was sitting up in bed, and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming.  At last she lay down gently and had motioned her daughter away.

“She will call me in presently,” added Miss Haldin.  “I left a bell near the bed.”

I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint.  The Western readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean.  It was, if I may say so, the want of experience.  Death is a remorseless spoliator.  The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all.  There is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience.  But the grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations.  It had the associations of bombs and gallows—­a lurid, Russian colouring which made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.

I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward display of deep feeling.  I admired her for that wonderful command over herself, even while I was a little frightened at it.  It was the stillness of a great tension.  What if it should suddenly snap?  Even the door of Mrs. Haldin’s room, with the old mother alone in there, had a rather awful aspect.