Then, again, she was not free to indulge in idle grief, in the luxury
of woe; the great house had still to be run, she had to bury her
beloved dead, the mourning which seems such a hopeless mockery when the
heart is racked with misery, had to be seen to; and she did it, and
went through it all, with outward calm, sustained by that Heron spirit
which may be described as the religion of her class--_noblesse oblige_.
Jessie had wept loudly through the house ever since the death, and
could weep as loudly now; but if Ida shed any tears she wept in the
silence and darkness of her own room, and no one heard her utter a
moan. "To suffer in silence and be strong" was the badge of all her
tribe, and she wore it with quiet stoicism.

Godfrey Heron's death had happened so suddenly that the news of it
scarcely got beyond the radius of the estate before the following
morning, and Stafford had gone to London in ignorance of this second
blow with which Fate had followed up the one he had dealt Ida: and when
the neighbours--the Vaynes, the Bannerdales, and the Avorys--came
quickly and readily enough to offer their sympathy and help, they could
do nothing. The girl solitary and lonely in her grief as she had been
solitary and lonely through her life, would see no one but the doctor
and Mr. Wordley, and the people who had once been warm and intimate
friends of the family left reluctantly and sully, to talk over the
melancholy circumstance, and to wonder what would become of the
daughter of the eccentric man who had lived the life of a recluse. Mr.
Wordley would have liked to have persuaded her to see some of the women
who had hastened to comfort her; but he knew that any attempt at
persuasion would have been in vain, that he would not have been able to
break down the barrier of reserve which the girl had instinctively and
reservedly erected between her suffering soul and the world. His heart
ached for her, and he did all that a man could do to lighten the burden
of her trouble; but there was very little that he could do beyond
superintending the necessary arrangements for the funeral.