They were a kissing
family, and after that dire event the habit had taken a fresh spring.
She had left behind her such a general passion of regret that in
kissing each other they felt themselves a little to be kissing her.
Now, as, standing in the hall, with the stiff watching footman--she
could have said to him angrily "Go away!"--planted near her, she
looked with unspeakable pain at her father's back while he mounted,
the effect was of his having withheld from another and a still more
slighted cheek the touch of his lips.
He was going to his room, and after a moment she heard his door
close. Then she said to the servant "Shut up the house"--she tried
to do everything her mother had done, to be a little of what she had
been, conscious only of falling woefully short--and took her own way
upstairs. After she had reached her room she waited, listening,
shaken by the apprehension that she should hear her father come out
again and go up to Godfrey. He would go up to tell him, to have it
over without delay, precisely because it would be so difficult. She
asked herself indeed why he should tell Godfrey when he hadn't taken
the occasion--their drive home being an occasion--to tell herself.
However, she wanted no announcing, no telling; there was such a
horrible clearness in her mind that what she now waited for was only
to be sure her father wouldn't proceed as she had imagined. At the
end of the minutes she saw this particular danger was over, upon
which she came out and made her own way to her brother.
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