“If you’ll lie down I’ll bring you a cup of tea, ma’am—though it can’t be beef.”

Feather staggered again to her bed and dropped flat upon it—flat as a slim little pancake in folds of thin black stuff which hung and floated.

“I can’t bring you cream,” said Cook as she went out of the room. “Louisa has had nothing but condensed milk—since yesterday—to give Miss Robin.”

“Oh-h!” groaned Feather, not in horror of the tea without cream though that was awful enough in its significance, but because this was the first time since the falling to pieces of her world that she had given a thought to the added calamity of Robin.

Chapter 4

If one were to devote one’s mental energies to speculation as to what is going on behind the noncommittal fronts of any row of houses in any great city the imaginative mind might be led far.

Bricks, mortar, windows, doors, steps which lead up to the threshold, are what are to be seen from the outside. Nothing particular may be transpiring within the walls, or tragedies, crimes, hideous suffering may be enclosed. The conclusion is obvious to banality—but as suggestive as banal—so suggestive in fact that the hyper-sensitive and too imaginative had better, for their own comfort’s sake, leave the matter alone. In most cases the existing conditions would not be altered even if one knocked at the door and insisted on entering with drawn sword in the form of attendant policeman The outside of the slice of a house in which Feather lived was still rather fresh from its last decorative touching up. It had been painted cream colour and had white doors and windows and green window boxes with variegated vinca vines trailing from them and pink geraniums, dark blue lobelia and ferns filling the earth stuffed in by the florist who provided such adornments. Passers-by frequently glanced at it and thought it a nice little house whose amusing diminutiveness was a sort of attraction. It was rather like a new doll’s house.

No one glancing at it in passing at the closing of this particular day had reason to suspect that any unaccustomed event was taking place behind the cream-coloured front. The front door “brasses” had been polished, the window-boxes watered and no cries for aid issued from the rooms behind them. The house was indeed quiet both inside and out. Inside it was indeed even quieter than usual. The servants’ preparation for departure had been made gradually and undisturbedly. There had been exhaustive quiet discussion of the subject each night for weeks, even before Robert Gareth-Lawless’illness. The smart young footman Edward who had means of gaining practical information had constituted himself a sort of private detective. He had in time learned all that was to be learned. This, it had made itself clear to him on investigation, was not one of those cases when to wait for evolutionary family events might be the part of discretion. There were no prospects ahead—none at all. Matters would only get worse and the whole thing would end in everybody not only losing their unpaid back wages but having to walk out into the street through the door of a disgraced household whose owners would be turned out into the street also when their belongings were sold over their heads. Better get out before everything went to pieces and there were unpleasantnesses. There would be unpleasantnesses because there was no denying that the trades-people had been played tricks with. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was only one of a lot of pretty daughters whose father was a poor country doctor in Jersey. He had had “ a stroke” himself and his widow would have nothing to live on when he died. That was what Mrs. Lawless had to look to. As to Lord Lawdor Edward had learned from those who DID know that he had never approved of his nephew and that he’d said he was a fool for marrying and had absolutely refused to have anything to do with him. He had six boys and a girl now and big estates weren’t what they had been, everyone knew. There was only one thing left for Cook and Edward and Emma and Louisa to do and that was to “get out” without any talk or argument.

“She’s not one that won’t find someone to look after her,” ended Edward. “Somebody or other will take her up because they’ll be sorry for her. But us lot aren’t widows and orphans.