She felt it so much
that when the sermon was over she waited at the vestry door for her
father to emerge. She couldn't let him go away without making at
least an effort to speak with him.
When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still playing upon his
intellectual face,--for he was one of the few parsons who manage in
their old age to look neither sordid nor inane,--he saw standing by
the vestry door a woman in a plain black dress, like a widow of the
people. She held by the hand a curly-haired little girl of
singularly calm and innocent expression. The woman's dark hair
waved gracefully on her high forehead, and caught his attention.
Her eyes were subtly sweet, her mouth full of pathos. She pressed
forward to speak to him; the Dean, all benignity, bent his head to
listen.
"Father!" Herminia cried, looking up at him.
The Dean started back. The woman who thus addressed him was barely
twenty-eight, she might well have been forty; grief and hard life
had made her old before her time. Her face was haggard. Beautiful
as she still was, it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a Mater
Dolorosa, not the roundfaced beauty of the fresh young girl who had
gone forth rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deanery at
Dunwich to the lecture-rooms at Girton.
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