She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyes that never let you know what she was thinking.  The firelight woke the flame in her reddish-tawny hair.  The red of her lips was turned back and crushed against the white.  Mary was shorter than her sisters, but she was the one that had the color.  And with it she had a stillness that was not theirs.  Mary’s face brooded more deeply than their faces, but it was untroubled in its brooding.

She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh birthday, and she was twenty-seven now.

Alice, the youngest girl (she was twenty-three) lay stretched out on the sofa.

She departed in no way from her sister’s type but that her body was slender and small boned, that her face was lightly finished, that her gray eyes were clear and her lips pale against the honey-white of her face, and that her hair was colorless as dust except where the edge of the wave showed a dull gold.

Alice had spent the whole evening lying on the sofa.  And now she raised her arms and bent them, pressing the backs of her hands against her eyes.  And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.

Gwendolen, the second sister, sat leaning over the table with her arms flung out on it as they had tossed from her the book she had been reading.

She was the tallest and the darkest of the three.  Her face followed the type obscurely; and vividly and emphatically it left it.  There was dusk in her honey-whiteness, and dark blue in the gray of her eyes.  The bridge of her nose and the arch of her upper lip were higher, lifted as it were in a decided and defiant manner of their own.  About Gwenda there was something alert and impatient.  Her very supineness was alive.  It had distinction, the savage grace of a creature utterly abandoned to a sane fatigue.

Gwenda had gone fifteen miles over the moors that evening.  She had run and walked and run again in the riotous energy of her youth.

Now she was too tired to read.

Gwenda was the first to speak.

“Is it ten yet?”

“No.”  Mary smiled, but the word shuddered in her throat like a weary moan.

“How long?”

“Forty-three minutes.”

“Oh, Lord——­” Gwenda laughed the laugh of brave nerves tortured.

From her sofa beyond the table Alice sighed.

At ten o’clock Essy Gale, the maid-servant, would come in from the kitchen and the Vicar from the inner room.  And Essy would put the Bible and Prayer-book on the table, and the Vicar would read Prayers.

That was all they were waiting for.  It was all that could happen.  It happened every night at ten o’clock.

III

Alice spoke next.