The maid took the way pointed out to her.  Soon she was walking up a gravel path, between trim, old-fashioned laurel hedges.  She stood at the door of a detached house.  It was an ordinary middle-class dwelling—­comfortable, commodious, ugly enough, except that stolidity and age did much to soften its ugliness.  It had, above all, the air of being a home—­a hospitable open-armed look, as if children had run in and out of it for years, as if young men had gone out from it to see the world and come back again to rest, as if young girls had fluttered about it, confiding their sports and their loves to its ivy-clad walls.  Now there hung about it a silence and sobriety that were like the shadows of coming oblivion.  The gas was turned low in the hall.  The old-fashioned omnibus that came lumbering from the railway with a box for the new maid seemed to startle the place with its noise.

In the large dining-room four people were sitting in dreary discussion.  The gas-light flared upon heavy mahogany furniture, upon red moreen curtains and big silver trays and dishes.  By the fire sat the two daughters of the aged woman.  They both had grey hair and wrinkled faces.  The married daughter was stout and energetic; the spinster was thin, careworn and nervous.  Two middle-aged men were listening to a complaint she made; the one was Robert Macdonald the minister, the other was the family doctor.

’It’s no use Robina’s telling me that I must coax my mother to eat, as if I hadn’t tried that’—­the voice became shrill—­’I’ve begged her, and prayed her, and reasoned with her.’

‘No, no, Miss Macdonald—­no, no,’ said the doctor soothingly.  ’You’ve done your best, we all understand that; it’s Mistress Brown that’s thinking of the situation in a wrong light; it’s needful to be plain and to say that Mistress Macdonald’s mind is affected.’

Robina Brown interposed with indignation and authority.

’My mother has always had her right mind; she’s been losing her memory.  All aged people lose their memories.’

The minister spoke with a meditative interest in a psychological phenomenon.  ’Ay, she’s been losing it backwards; she forgot who we were first, and remembered us all as little children; then she forgot us and your father altogether.  Latterly she’s been living back in the days when her father and mother were living at Kelsey Farm.  It’s strange to hear her talk.  There’s not, as far as I know, another being on this wide earth of all those that came and went to Kelsey Farm that is alive now.’

Miss Macdonald wiped her eyes; her voice shook as she spoke; the nervousness of fatigue and anxiety accentuated her grief.  ’She was asking me how much butter we made in the dairy to-day, and asking if the curly cow had her calf, and what Jeanie Trim was doing.’

‘Who was Jeanie Trim?’ asked the minister.

‘How should I know?  I suppose she was one of the Kelsey servants.’