But the truth of what she said, the reality of that call of the blood, seemed to cast a shadow over it.

He knew beyond all other knowledge that it was there: only it looked out at him with a shadow, faint, but unmistakable, fallen across it.

But the sense of that made him the more eagerly accept her suggestion.
"Yes, darling, we'll never speak of it again," he said.

"That would be much wisest." Lady Ashbridge's funeral took place three days afterwards, down in Suffolk, and those hours detached themselves in Michael's mind from all that had gone before, and all that might follow, like a little piece of blue sky in the midst of storm clouds.

The limitations of man's consciousness, which forbid him to think poignantly about two things at once, hedged that day in with an impenetrable barrier, so that while it lasted, and afterwards for ever in memory, it was unflecked by trouble or anxiety, and hung between heaven and earth in a serenity of its own.
The coffin lay that night in his mother's bedroom, which was next to Michael's, and when he went up to bed he found himself listening for any sound that came from there.