“Sure?” Constance questioned.

“Quite, thank you,” said Sophia.

“Well, I’ll leave you.  I expect Amy will have tea ready directly.”  She went down into the kitchen.  “Amy,” she said, “as soon as we’ve finished tea, light a fire in Mrs. Scales’s bedroom.”

“In the top bedroom, m’m?”

“Yes.”

Constance climbed again to her own bedroom, and shut the door.  She needed a moment to herself, in the midst of this terrific affair.  She sighed with relief as she removed her mantle.  She thought:  “At any rate we’ve met, and I’ve got her here.  She’s very nice.  No, she isn’t a bit altered.”  She hesitated to admit that to her Sophia was the least in the world formidable.  And so she said once more:  “She’s very nice.  She isn’t a bit altered.”  And then:  “Fancy her being here!  She really is here.”  With her perfect simplicity it did not occur to Constance to speculate as to what Sophia thought of her.

Sophia was downstairs first, and Constance found her looking at the blank wall beyond the door leading to the kitchen steps.

“So this is where you had it bricked up?” said Sophia.

“Yes,” said Constance.  “That’s the place.”

“It makes me feel like people feel when they have tickling in a limb that’s been cut off!” said Sophia.

“Oh, Sophia!”

The tea received a great deal of praise from Sophia, but neither of them ate much.  Constance found that Sophia was like herself:  she had to be particular about her food.  She tasted dainties for the sake of tasting, but it was a bird’s pecking.  Not the twelfth part of the tea was consumed.  They dared not indulge caprices.  Only their eyes could feed.

After tea they went up to the drawing-room, and in the corridor had the startling pleasure of seeing two dogs who scurried about after each other in amity.  Spot had found Fossette, with the aid of Amy’s incurable carelessness, and had at once examined her with great particularity.  She seemed to be of an amiable disposition, and not averse from the lighter distractions.  For a long time the sisters sat chatting together in the lit drawing-room to the agreeable sound of happy dogs playing in the dark corridor.  Those dogs saved the situation, because they needed constant attention.  When the dogs dozed, the sisters began to look through photograph albums, of which Constance had several, bound in plush or morocco.  Nothing will sharpen the memory, evoke the past, raise the dead, rejuvenate the ageing, and cause both sighs and smiles, like a collection of photographs gathered together during long years of life.  Constance had an astonishing menagerie of unknown cousins and their connections, and of townspeople; she had Cyril at all ages; she had weird daguerreotypes of her parents and their parents.  The strangest of all was a portrait of Samuel Povey as an infant in arms.  Sophia checked an impulse to laugh at it.  But when Constance said:  “Isn’t it funny?” she did allow herself to laugh.  A photograph of Samuel in the year before his death was really imposing.  Sophia stared at it, impressed.  It was the portrait of an honest man.