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�There was a moon somewhere above the snow-clouds that already were beginning to grow thin from the burden they had discharged, and the smug villas on each side of the road were clearly visible. She had to go up the length of Alfred Road, then turn down the street that led by St Thomas’s Vicarage, and emerge into West Street, where she lived with her brother. Already, a fortnight ago he had ascertained the number of their house, not asking for it directly, but causing her to volunteer the information, and since then he had half a dozen times gone through the street, on his way to and from the Stores in order to take a glance at it as he passed. He had wanted to know what the house looked like; he had wanted to construct the circumstances of her life, to know the aspect of her environment, to see the front-door out of which she came to her duties as his secretary. That all concerned her, and for that reason it concerned him. He knew the house well by now: he knew from chance remarks that he had angled for that her bedroom looked into the street, that Charles’s looked on to an old{154} disused graveyard behind. There was the dining-room and the sitting-room in front, and a paling behind which Michaelmas daisies flourished in a thin row. She cared for flowers, but not for flowers in a six-inch bed. They rather provoked her: they were playing at being flowers. She liked them when they grew in wild woodland spaces, and were not confined between a house-wall and a row of tiled path.From the mere habit of pawing, he laid his hand on hers.

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‘I don’t think mother is in yet,’ she said. ‘We won’t wait tea for her. Buns? There they are. And it’s two lumps of sugar, isn’t it? And how are you?’��

‘I cannot conceive why she should do any such thing,’ remarked Keeling.‘I gather that the owner wishes the transaction to be private,’ he said. ‘And I wish the same.’‘Yes; and it was true before you were born or thought of,’ continued this terrible old lady. ‘Your father didn’t marry so much beneath him either. Ah, he was in a precious small way, he was, when he came a-courting your mother.’

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�‘Better?’ he asked. ‘He got well, and sang his psalms in Heaven this morning. I felt in church as if I could hear his voice.’One night early in December Norah Propert was busily engaged in the sitting-room of her brother’s house just off the market-place at Bracebridge. She had left him over a book and a cigarette in the dining-room, and as soon as she had finished her supper had gone across the passage to her work again. The room was very simply decorated: to Mrs Keeling’s plush-and-mirror eye it would have seemed to be hardly decorated at all. There were a few framed photographs or cheap reproductions of famous pictures on the walls, a book-case held some three hundred volumes, the floor had a fawn-coloured drugget on it, and there was not a square inch of plush anywhere.

��Conversation came to a dead halt here, and again Mrs Keeling, with growing resentment, took in Norah from head to foot. The seconds were beaten out sonorously by the pink clock on the chimney-piece, and at last Norah, now growing thoroughly uncomfortable in this hostile atmosphere, rose.

�‘That would be delightful of you,’ he said, ‘but pray let us get rid of the dreadful word funeral. Birthday should it not be?’‘I shall be delighted to,’ he said. ‘Have you{171} got a seconder? Ah, I think that is not necessary when the President proposes a candidate. I will certainly put down your name when I go into Bracebridge next.’

�He assented to the fact that people were fools. ‘But is that the end of my library catalogue?’ he asked.She flushed a little.