“I’m not going to let her think she can spoil my appetite!” said Sophia, dauntless.  Truly that woman’s spirit was unquenchable.

She cut a couple of slices off the cold fowl; she cut a tomato into slices; she disturbed the butter; she crumbled bread on the cloth, and rubbed bits of fowl over the plates, and dirtied knives and forks.  Then she put the slices of fowl and bread and tomato into a piece of tissue paper, and silently went upstairs with the parcel and came down again a moment afterwards empty-handed.

After an interval she rang the bell, and lighted the gas.

“We’ve finished, Maud.  You can clear away.”

Constance thirsted for a cup of tea.  She felt that a cup of tea was the one thing that would certainly keep her alive.  She longed for it passionately.  But she would not demand it from Maud.  Nor would she mention it to Sophia, lest Sophia, flushed by the victory of the door, should incur new risks.  She simply did without.  On empty stomachs they tried pathetically to help each other in games of Patience.  And when the blithe Maud passed through the parlour on the way to bed, she saw two dignified and apparently calm ladies, apparently absorbed in a delightful game of cards, apparently without a worry in the world.  They said “Good night, Maud,” cheerfully, politely, and coldly.  It was a heroic scene.  Immediately afterwards Sophia carried Fossette up to her own bedroom.

II

The next afternoon the sisters, in the drawing-room, saw Dr. Stirling’s motor-car speeding down the Square.  The doctor’s partner, young Harrop, had died a few years before at the age of over seventy, and the practice was much larger than it had ever been, even in the time of old Harrop.  Instead of two or three horses, Stirling kept a car, which was a constant spectacle in the streets of the district.

“I do hope he’ll call in,” said Mrs. Povey, and sighed.

Sophia smiled to herself with a little scorn.  She knew that Constance’s desire for Dr. Stirling was due simply to the need which she felt of telling some one about the great calamity that had happened to them that morning.  Constance was utterly absorbed by it, in the most provincial way.  Sophia had said to herself at the beginning of her sojourn in Bursley, and long afterwards, that she should never get accustomed to the exasperating provinciality of the town, exemplified by the childish preoccupation of the inhabitants with their own two-penny affairs.  No characteristic of life in Bursley annoyed her more than this.  None had oftener caused her to yearn in a brief madness for the desert-like freedom of great cities.  But she had got accustomed to it.  Indeed, she had almost ceased to notice it.  Only occasionally, when her nerves were more upset than usual, did it strike her.

She went into Constance’s bedroom to see whether the doctor’s car halted in King Street.  It did.