And with little further warning Mrs.Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as she had left him in the professor's chair, but with his feet raised stiffly upon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broad north light that filled the room.
The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes gazed yet more closely at her.

But there was little to gather from the strained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips.

Not a cry had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes against a background of grim tomes.

There was no swaying of the lissome figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken.

In moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the way in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and complete detachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes us sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should; and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of her tragic freedom.