“But suppose he wants something in the night?”

“Well, child, I should hear him moving.  Sleep’s the best thing for him.”

Mrs. Baines left Mr. Povey to the effects of laudanum, and came along the corridor.  She was a stout woman, all black stuff and gold chain, and her skirt more than filled the width of the corridor.  Sophia watched her habitual heavy mounting gesture as she climbed the two steps that gave variety to the corridor.  At the gas-jet she paused, and, putting her hand to the tap, gazed up into the globe.

“Where’s Sophia?” she demanded, her eyes fixed on the gas as she lowered the flame.

“I think she must be in bed, mother,” said Constance, nonchalantly.

The returned mistress was point by point resuming knowledge and control of that complicated machine—­her household.

Then Constance and her mother disappeared into the bedroom, and the door was shut with a gentle, decisive bang that to the silent watcher on the floor above seemed to create a special excluding intimacy round about the figures of Constance and her father and mother.  The watcher wondered, with a little prick of jealousy, what they would be discussing in the large bedroom, her father’s beard wagging feebly and his long arms on the counterpane, Constance perched at the foot of the bed, and her mother walking to and fro, putting her cameo brooch on the dressing-table or stretching creases out of her gloves.  Certainly, in some subtle way, Constance had a standing with her parents which was more confidential than Sophia’s.

III

When Constance came to bed, half an hour later, Sophia was already in bed.  The room was fairly spacious.  It had been the girls’ retreat and fortress since their earliest years.  Its features seemed to them as natural and unalterable as the features of a cave to a cave-dweller.  It had been repapered twice in their lives, and each papering stood out in their memories like an epoch; a third epoch was due to the replacing of a drugget by a resplendent old carpet degraded from the drawing-room.  There was only one bed, the bedstead being of painted iron; they never interfered with each other in that bed, sleeping with a detachment as perfect as if they had slept on opposite sides of St. Luke’s Square; yet if Constance had one night lain down on the half near the window instead of on the half near the door, the secret nature of the universe would have seemed to be altered.  The small fire-grate was filled with a mass of shavings of silver paper; now the rare illnesses which they had suffered were recalled chiefly as periods when that silver paper was crammed into a large slipper-case which hung by the mantelpiece, and a fire of coals unnaturally reigned in its place—­the silver paper was part of the order of the world.  The sash of the window would not work quite properly, owing to a slight subsidence in the wall, and even when the window was fastened there was always a narrow slit to the left hand between the window and its frame; through this slit came draughts, and thus very keen frosts were remembered by the nights when Mrs. Baines caused the sash to be forced and kept at its full height by means of wedges—­the slit of exposure was part of the order of the world.