For months now Miss Carew had lived under a great strain.  From the evening when she had found Molly sitting on the floor with the tin box open before her, and old, yellow letters lying on the ground about it, she had been almost constantly uneasy.  She could not forget the sight of Molly crouching like a tramp in the midst of the warm, comfortable room, biting her right hand in a horrible physical convulsion.  It was of no use to try to think that Molly’s condition that night was entirely the result of illness, or that the loss of her unknown mother had upset her to that degree or at all in that way.  The character of Molly’s mental state was quite, quite different from the qualities that come of grief or sickness.  Then had followed the very anxious nursing, during which all other thoughts had been swallowed up in immediate anxiety and responsibility.

During Molly’s convalescence, in the quiet days by the sea-side, Miss Carew began to reflect on a kind of coherent unity in the delirious talk she had listened to during the worst days of the illness.  And she also noticed that Molly, by furtive little jokes and sudden, irrelevant questions, was trying to find out what Miss Carew had heard her say.  Then it became evident that Molly attributed all the excitement of that night to her subsequent illness—­only once, and that very calmly, alluding to the fact of her mother’s death.

Miss Carew had no wish to penetrate the mystery of the black box and the faded letters.  She had a sort of instinctive horror of the subject, but she could not but watch the fate of the box when they came back to the flat.  Molly paid no attention to it whatever, and said in a natural tone: 

“I shall send my father’s dispatch box and sword-case and my own dispatch boxes in a cab.  Would you mind taking them and having them put in the little room next to my bed-room?”

But in the end Molly had taken them herself, as she thought Miss Carew had a slight cold.  Miss Carew always had a certain dislike to the door of the little room next to Molly’s, which had evidently been once used for a powder closet.  She did not even know if the door were locked or not, and she never touched the handle.  She had an uncanny horror of passing the door, at least so she said afterwards; probably in retrospect she came to exaggerate her feelings as to these things.

She was puzzled and confused:  her health was not good, and her faculties were dimmed.  It was probably the strain of living with Molly whom she could no longer control or guide, and who was so evidently in dire need of some one to do both.  She felt dreadfully burdened with responsibility, both as to the things she did understand and the things she did not understand.  What she could not understand was a sense of moral darkness, like a great, looming grey cloud, sometimes simply dark and heavy, and at other times a cloud electric with coming danger.  She felt as if burdened with a secret which she longed