“Nicky ought to know his own ear best.  Go and tell him he’s not to stand on the top of the wall.  And if they’re coming wave to them, to show you’re glad to see them.”

“But—­Mummy—­I’m not.”

She knew it was dreadful before she said it.  But she had warded off reproof by nuzzling against her mother’s cheek as it tried to turn away from her.  She saw her mother’s upper lip moving, twitching.  The sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a dust that quivered.  Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the mouth of a nuzzling puppy, remained grave and tender.  She was earnest and imperturbable in her truthfulness.  “Whether you’re glad or not you must go,” said Frances.  She meant to be obeyed.

Dorothy went.  Her body was obedient.  For as yet she had her mother’s body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose with the fine, tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair, brown on the top and light underneath, and on the curve of the roll above her little ears.  Frances had watched the appearance of those details with an anxiety that would have surprised her if she had been aware of it.  She wanted to see herself in the bodies of her sons and in the mind of her daughter.  But Dorothy had her father’s mind.  You couldn’t move it.  What she had said once she stuck to for ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree.  As if sticking to a thing for ever could make it right once.  And Dorothy had formed the habit of actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten.  Frances foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude, might, in time, become annoying in a daughter.  There were moments when she was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious organism, mixed up of her body and her husband’s mind.

But in secret she admired her daughter’s candour, her downrightness and straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions and hypocrisies.  Frances was not glad, she knew she was not glad, any more than Dorothy was glad, to see her mother and her sisters.  She only pretended.  In secret she was afraid of every moment she would have to live with them.  She had lived with them too long.  She foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how they would look, what they would say and do, and with what gestures.  It would be like the telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that you know every word of.

She thought she had sent them a kind message.  But she knew she had only asked them to come early in order that they might go early and leave her to her happiness.

She went 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.