Rotha, who was coming and going from the kitchen to the larder, found a chair for the schoolmaster, and he slid into it with the air of one who was persuading himself that his late advent was unobserved.
"I met that Garth--that--Joe Garth on the road, and he kept me," whispered Monsey apologetically to Matthew across the table.

The presence of Death somewhere in the vicinity had banished the schoolmaster's spirit of fun.
While this was going on at one end of the table, Rotha had made her way to the other end, with the ostensible purpose of cutting up the cheese, but with the actual purpose of listening to a conversation in which his reverence Nicholas Stevens was beginning to bear an unusually animated part.

Some one had made allusion to the sudden and, as was alleged, the unseemly departure of Ralph Ray on the eve of his father's funeral.

Some one else had deplored the necessity for that departure, and had spoken of it as a cruel outrage on the liberties of a good man.

From this generous if somewhat disloyal sentiment his reverence was expressing dissent.