Night, black and cold, settled over the house that had that day for the first time been visited by death.

Besides the dead man, there were now three people to sleep in it: an old woman, whose failing brain had little of intelligence left, except such as showed itself in the everyday habits of a long and orderly life; the young girl, whose mind slow by nature in reaching maturity and retarded by the monotony of her life, had not yet gained the power of realising its own deeper thoughts, still less of explaining them to another; and this man, Bates, who, being by natural constitution peculiarly susceptible to the strain of the sight of illness and death which he had just undergone, was not in the best condition to resist the morbid influences of unhappy companionship.
The girl shed tears as she moved about sullenly.

She would not speak to Bates, and he did not in the least understand that, sullen as she was, her speechlessness did not result from that, but from inability to reduce to any form the chaotic emotions within her, or to find any expression which might represent her distress.

He could not realise that the childish mind that had power to converse for trivial things had, as yet, no word for the not-trivial; that the blind womanly emotion on which he had trodden had as yet no counterpart in womanly thought, which might have formed excuses for his conduct, or at least have comprehended its simplicity.

He only felt uneasily that her former cause of contention with him, her determination, sudden as her father's death, to leave the only home she possessed, was now enforced by her antagonism to the suggestion he had made of a future marriage, and he felt increasing annoyance that it should be so.