. One after the other Aunt Mary, Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Anna
and Aunt Caroline had been carried out of the dark house in which they
had ended their blameless days to a still darker and very narrow house
within the precincts of Kencote church, and the eldest sister, now an
amazingly aged woman, but still in the possession of all her faculties,
and the youngest, who although many years her junior, was well over
seventy, were all that were left of the bevy of spinster ladies.

On their father's death, now nearly forty years ago, they had removed in
a body from the big house in which they had lived in a state of subdued
self-repression to the small one in which, for the first time, they were
to taste independence. For their father had been a terrible martinet
where women were concerned, and would as readily have ordered Aunt Ellen
to bed, at the age of fifty, if he had been displeased with her, as if
she had been a child of ten. And if he had ordered her she would have
gone.

Some of the rooms in the dower-house had been occupied by the agent to
the Kencote estate who at that time was a bachelor, and the rest had
been shut up. The six sisters spent the happiest hours they had hitherto
known in the arrangement of their future lives and of the beautiful old
furniture with which the house was stocked. The lives were to be active,
regular, and charitable. Colonel Thomas, who had allowed them each
twenty pounds a year for dress allowance and pocket-money during his
lifetime, had astonished everybody by leaving them six thousand pounds
apiece in his will, which had been made afresh a year before his death.
He had just then inherited the large fortune of his younger brother, who
had succeeded to the paternal business in Cheapside, lived and died a
bachelor, and saved a great deal of money every year. By his previous
will they would have had a hundred a year each from the estate, and the
use of the dower-house. But even that would have seemed wealth to these
simple ladies as long as they remained together, and all of them alive.
For Colonel Thomas had forgotten, in that first will, to make provision
for the probability of one of them outliving the rest and being reduced
to a solitary existence on a hundred pounds a year. However, with
fifteen hundred a year or so between them, and no rent to pay, they were
exceedingly well off, kept their modest carriage, employed two men in
their garden, and found such pleasures in dividing their su