She moved herself uneasily.  ‘I wish he would come down,’ she whispered, still gazing at the skybacked picture.  ’It is so dangerous to be absent-minded up there.’

When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid hold of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then let it go and stepped back.  In stepping, his foot slipped.  An instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the air, immediately disappearing downwards.

His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement.  Her lips parted, and she gasped for breath.  She could utter no sound.  One by one the people about her, unconscious of what had happened, turned their heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible upon their faces at the sight of the poor child.  A moment longer, and she fell to the floor.

The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was of being carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the steps of her own house by her brother and an older man.  Recollection of what had passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they entered the door—­through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few instants before—­her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud.  Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous—­however foreign in essence these scenes may be—­as chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires.  Even after that time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea’s mind the scene from the Town Hall windows than sunlight streaming in shaft-like lines.

4.  October the nineteenth

When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of horror accompany it.  Sadness, from the death itself:  horror, from the clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.

The funeral had taken place.  Depressed, yet resolved in his demeanour, Owen Graye sat before his father’s private escritoire, engaged in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of papers—­forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times—­most of all to one under the influence of a great grief.  Laminae of white paper tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other white papers bounded by black edges—­these with blue foolscap wrapped round with crude red tape.

The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were ascertained:—­