nt down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and Dorothy
were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought that she
wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they were
coming early. It struck her that this was sad.

* * * * *

Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the
Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and
the yellow clay of the Heath.

"How little they look," Michael said.

Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them
pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the
difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would
be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be
sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying, already, in her
clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't change me." The
utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn't help it.

Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came
nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden and
the lane.

II

Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to
the tree of Heaven.

She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to
each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident.
It had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of
appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie carried it off best. Sharp
and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never lent itself to any group. But for
her black gown she really might not have belonged.

Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was only
sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was wrapped
up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed, fascinated by
her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if hypnotized by her
own sorrow.

To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of mystic
hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them
of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could. But to
her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and
gentle. So that, when they happened to be all together, her moods
changed so rapidly that she seemed a creature of unaccountable caprice.
One minute her small, white, dry face q