‘Well, it’s if you can manage, mum,’ she replied.  ’I don’t see as I could have any fault to find, if you thought you could both live in that little room.  And as for the rent, I should be quite satisfied if we said seven shillings instead of five and six.’

’Thank you, Mrs. Conisbee; thank you very much indeed.  I will write to my sister at once; the news will be a great relief to her.  We shall have quite an enjoyable little holiday together.’

A week later the eldest of the three Miss Maddens arrived.  As it was quite impossible to find space for her boxes in the bedroom, Mrs. Conisbee allowed them to be deposited in the room occupied by her daughter, which was on the same floor.  In a day or two the sisters had begun a life of orderly tenor.  When weather permitted they were out either in the morning or afternoon.  Alice Madden was in London for the first time; she desired to see the sights, but suffered the restrictions of poverty and ill-health.  After nightfall, neither she nor Virginia ever left home.

There was not much personal likeness between them.

The elder (now five-and-thirty) tended to corpulence, the result of sedentary life; she had round shoulders and very short legs.  Her face would not have been disagreeable but for its spoilt complexion; the homely features, if health had but rounded and coloured them, would have expressed pleasantly enough the gentleness and sincerity of her character.  Her cheeks were loose, puffy, and permanently of the hue which is produced by cold; her forehead generally had a few pimples; her shapeless chin lost itself in two or three fleshy fissures.  Scarcely less shy than in girlhood, she walked with a quick, ungainly movement as if seeking to escape from some one, her head bent forward.

Virginia (about thirty-three) had also an unhealthy look, but the poverty, or vitiation, of her blood manifested itself in less unsightly forms.  One saw that she had been comely, and from certain points of view her countenance still had a grace, a sweetness, all the more noticeable because of its threatened extinction.  For she was rapidly ageing; her lax lips grew laxer, with emphasis of a characteristic one would rather not have perceived there; her eyes sank into deeper hollows; wrinkles extended their network; the flesh of her neck wore away.  Her tall meagre body did not seem strong enough to hold itself upright.

Alice had brown hair, but very little of it.  Virginia’s was inclined to be ruddy; it surmounted her small head in coils and plaits not without beauty.  The voice of the elder sister had contracted an unpleasant hoarseness, but she spoke with good enunciation; a slight stiffness and pedantry of phrase came, no doubt, of her scholastic habits.  Virginia was much more natural in manner and fluent in speech, even as she moved far more gracefully.

It was now sixteen years since the death of Dr. Madden of Clevedon.  The story of his daughters’ lives in the interval may be told with brevity suitable to so unexciting a narrative.