232 The Real Charlotte, 



got the drops from the sideboard, poured them out, and, on 

 her way back to the inert figure on the floor, rang the bell 

 violently. Muffy had crept from under the table to snuff 

 with uncanny curiosity at his mistress's livid face, and as 

 Charlotte approached, he put his tail between his legs and 

 yapped shrilly at her. 



" Get out, ye damned cur ! " she exclaimed, the coarse, 

 superstitious side of her nature coming uppermost now that 

 the absorbing stress of those acts of self-preservation was 

 over. Her big foot lifted the dog and sent him flying across 

 the room, and she dropped on her knees beside the motion- 

 less, tumbled figure on the floor. " She's dead ! she's 

 dead ! " she cried out, and as if in protest against her own 

 words she flung water upon the unresisting face, and tried 

 to force the drops between the closed teeth. But the face 

 never altered ; it only acquired momentarily the immovable 

 preoccupation of death, that asserted itself in silence, and 

 gave the feeble features a supreme dignity, in spite of the 

 thin dabbled fringe and the gold ear-rings and brooch, that 

 were instinct with the vulgarities of life. 



CHAPTER XXXni. 



Few possessed of any degree of imagination can turn their 

 backs on a churchyard, after having witnessed there the 

 shovelling upon and stamping down of the last poor refuge 

 of that which all feel to be superfluous, a mere fragment of 

 the inevitable debris of life, without a clinging hope that in 

 some way or other the process may be avoided for them- 

 selves. In spite of philosophy, the body will not picture its 

 surrender to the sordid thraldom of the undertaker and the 

 mastery of the spade, and preferably sees itself falling 

 through cold miles of water to some vague resting-place 

 below the tides, or wedged beyond search in the grip of an 

 ice crack, or swept as grey ash into a cinerary urn ; anything 

 rather than the prisoning coffin and blind weight of earth. 

 So Christopher thought impatiently, as he drove back to 

 Bruff" from Mrs. Lambert's funeral, in the dismal solemnity 

 of black clothes and a brougham, while the distant rattle of 

 a reaping-machine was like a voice full of the health and 



