buried records.

So she sat, it might be for two minutes. Then, quite suddenly, she had
bitten her lip and her brows had wrinkled. And her eyes had locked to
a fixed look that would stay till she had thought this out. So her
face said, and the stillness of her hand.

For she had suddenly remembered when and where it was she had read to
that man about Mary and the fat boy. It was in the garden at her
mother's twenty-two years ago. She remembered it well now, and quite
suddenly. She could remember how Gerry, young-man-wise, had tried to
utilise Thackeray to show his greater knowledge of the world--had
flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an
astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him,
because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned the page
before he was ready. And his decision that Dickens's characters were
never gentlemen, and her saying perhaps that was why he was so
amusing. And then how he got the book from her and went on reading
while she went away for her lawn-tennis shoes, and when she came
back found he had only two more pages to read, and then he would
come and play.

But it spoke well for her husband's chances of a quiet time to-night
that he should hold this memory in his mind, and yet be secure against
a complete resurrection of the past. Nothing else might grow from it.
He evidently thought the reading had been at Shepherd's Bush. He would
hardly have said, "the kitten wasn't there," unless his ideas had been
glued to that spot. But then--and Rosalind's mind swam to think of
it--how very decisively the kitten was "not there" in that other
garden two-and-twenty years ago.

It was at that moment the gasp, or sigh, or sob, or whatever it
was, awoke Sally. Her mother had been strong against the mere memory
of the happy hour of thoughtless long ago; but then, this that was
to come--this thing the time was thoughtless of! Was it not enough
to force a gasp from self-control itself? a cry from any creature
claiming to be human? "_The kitten wasn't there!_" No, truly she
was not.

CHAPTER XXXIX

HOW MEMORY CREPT BACK AND BACK, AND FENWICK KEPT HIS OWN COUNSEL.
ROSALIND NEED NEVER KNOW IT. OF A JOLLY BIG BLOB OF MELTED CANDLE,
AND SALLY'S HALF-BROTHER. OF FENWICK'S IMPROVED GOOD SPIRITS

That was a day of many little incidents, and a fine day into the
bargain. Perhaps the next day was helped to be a flat day by the
barometer, which had