With so much rain it was hard to tell who was weeping. For those who, like himself, felt it indelicate to raise an umbrella in the presence of death, external nature provided a semblance of that tribute which, from a?winter? spring, the heart could not or would not offer. Hugh had no tears. But Penn was certainly weeping. Hugh looked at the boy. He seemed slight and childish in his school mackintosh, his little thin face all red with grief, as he stared down at the raindrops fretting the pool of water in the pit below him, and thrust his knuckles regularly into his eyes. He had scarcely known his grandmother, but because she was his grandmother he had loved her, and he sorrowed now with a complete sorrow as at an utter loss. Hugh envied the completeness. All the same there was something frail, almost sentimental about the boy. He was quite unlike the tough Australian grandson of Hugh's imaginings. Given what the boy's father was like, they had all been prepared for something roughish, but not for this rather pathetic elf.
Hugh looked at Miranda. She too appeared younger than her age.
She must surely, he reminded himself, be fourteen now. Or was she? It was shocking not to know. Her very pale freckled face, so like her mother's, wore a paralysed self-conscious expression. She was not crying. She looked steadily upward above the heads of the mourners, determined not to catch the eye of her parents, and as if absorbed in some long calculation of her own. Now and then with a nervous hand she patted the unaccustomed little black hat which covered her red-golden hair, her bright hair which fell usually in big separate locks like a cap of autumn leaves, hidden now except where a few rain darkened ends clung to her neck. She was to Hugh a totally mysterious little girl.