Just then, she saw the coffin. Somehow she had avoided seeing it before, though it stood far forward before the altar on a high stand, a tall candle at each corner, covered in black. Grace stared at it now, fascinated, tugging at her brooch as she did when she was nervous. But it had no reality—a black box surrounded by candles. It did not mean “Edward.” It just meant death, and she did not have any idea what death meant.

At the moment it seemed to mean Mrs. Brimmer constantly turning round and craning her neck, to catch her husband’s eye if and when he should come. It meant Professor Goldberg, immaculate and stiff, for once not smiling, wearing his Prince Albert as if he had been born in it, behaving so much like an undertaker that Grace caught herself smiling. It meant the rows and rows of students, girls without hats who had tied scarves over their heads, earnest embarrassed young men, and over all, oozing like honey, the pale sentimental organ music. But as she watched, taking it all in like a person at a play, Grace felt falling away from her, little by little, the self-consciousness and the excitement and finally bowed her head as if to shut out all this, as if to find some still point on which she might rest, from which she might go out towards Edward, in which the occasion might at last take on its reality, and she feel a part of it and not the lonely, egocentric, arrogant observer she had been until now.

It seemed, in the hush as the bell stopped tolling, and for a moment even the organ was silent, as if they were all suspended in a vacuum, completely separate. Then as more definite music made itself heard, the ushers walked slowly down to their places and Fosca alone escorted Isabel Ferrier to her pew. Faces lifted to see her go past, not knowing perhaps who she was, though “family” seemed implicit in her solemn formally-set-apart arrival, in the black veil which hid her face.

“Who’s that?” the incorrigible Mrs. Brimmer whispered in Grace’s ear.

“His sister,” she whispered back. But Grace thought, as the lonely figure knelt to pray, not of Isabel, but of their mother, so cruelly absent now and always for so many years, she who held Edward’s love locked up in her helpless heart, helplessly.