‘Uncle Meshach ought to be in the lunatic asylum, I think,’ John’s voice came majestically out of the gloom as they groped towards the door.

’We shall have to be polite to Arthur Twemlow, when he comes, if he is coming,’ said John after they had gone upstairs.  ’I understand he’s quite a reformed character.’

* * * * *

Because she fancied she had noticed that the window at the end of the corridor was open, she came out of the bedroom a few minutes later, and traversed the dark corridor to satisfy herself, and found the window wide open.  The night was cloudy and warm, and a breeze moved among the foliage of the garden.  In the mysterious diffused light she could distinguish the forms of the poplar trees.  Suddenly the bushes immediately beneath her were disturbed as though by some animal.

‘Good night, Ethel.’

‘Good night, Fred.’

She shook with violent agitation as the amazing adieu from the garden was answered from the direction of her daughter’s window.  But the secondary effect of those words, so simply and affectionately whispered in the darkness, was to bring a tear to her eye.  As the mother comprehended the whole staggering situation, the woman envied Ethel for her youth, her naughty innocence, her romance, her incredibly foolish audacity in thus risking the disaster of parental wrath.  Leonora heard cautious footsteps on the gravel, and the slow closing of a window.  ’My life is over!’ she said to herself.  ’And hers beginning.  And to think that this afternoon I called her a schoolgirl!  What romance have I had in my life?’

She put her head out of the window.  There was no movement now, but above her a radiance streaming from Rose’s dormer showed that the serious girl of the family, defying commands, plodded obstinately at her chemistry.  As Leonora thought of Rose’s ambition, and Ethel’s clandestine romance, and little Millicent’s complicity in that romance, and John’s sinister secrets, and her own ineffectual repining—­as she thought of these five antagonistic preoccupied souls and their different affairs, the pathos and the complexity of human things surged over her and overwhelmed her.

CHAPTER II

MESHACH AND HANNAH

The little old bachelor and spinster were resting after dinner in the back-parlour of their house near the top of Church Street.  In that abode they had watched generations pass and manners change, as one list hearthrug succeeded another in the back-parlour.  Meshach had been born in the front bedroom, and he meant to die there; Hannah had also been born in the front bedroom, but it was through the window of the back bedroom that the housewife’s soul would rejoin the infinite.  The house, which Meshach’s grandfather, first of his line to emerge from the grey mass of the proletariat, had ruined himself to build, was a six-roomed dwelling of honest workmanship in