eldest of the fox
terriers, who had a habit of sitting in the chair at which Christian,
knelt to say her prayers, and would then, with her bland and balmy
smile, extort confidences denied to any other living creature.

On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst
of all, the dismissals. The house (pending the materialisation of the
Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external
departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from
her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old
friendships. Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left,
alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old
wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with
the obliteration of her past life to be her task.

An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a
funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of
letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room
books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated rubbish that
life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all
valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of
good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark
days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up
and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt,
curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all
portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let
Christian out of her sight for a single instant.

The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the
onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it
seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one's own
little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters
of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one
insignificant segment of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw
her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to
have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what
they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes,
to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost. And on Monday
afternoon with the early darkness the storm began. There came first a
little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out
the land. There followed co