Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

It was a September night, and a moon was shining, and Arnold Furze went out into the orchard, though why he went there he did not know. Perhaps he went because the shadows drew him, and the obscure solitudes under the old trees, and perhaps because he would be so very much alone there with his own terrible loneliness.

It was seven days since her death, seven days of a numb sort of bewilderment and of an inexpressible anguish, of things dimly realized in the midst of the day's inevitable work. Beasts have to be looked to and cows milked even when a woman is lying dead. He had gone dully through the familiar routine, and yet finding in it a poignant strangeness, an almost meaningless futility. And only a week ago she had helped him to milk those cows.