She covered it with her hand. At the door he paused again.

"Don't forget," he said, fumbling with the handle, "don't forget to write to Edward." At last he had turned the handle and was gone.

 

 

They were silent. There was something strained in the atmosphere, Eleanor felt. She took one of the little books that she had dropped on the table and laid it open on her knee. But she did not look at it. Her glance fixed itself rather absent-mindedly upon the farther room. The trees were coming out in the back garden; there were little leaves--little ear-shaped leaves on the bushes. The sun was shining, fitfully; it was going in and it was going out, lighting up now this, now--

"Eleanor," Rose interrupted. She held herself in a way that was oddly like her father's.

"Eleanor," she repeated in a low voice, for her sister was not attending.

"Well?" said Eleanor, looking at her.

"I want to go to Lamley's," said Rose.

She looked the image of her father, standing there with her hands behind her back.

"It's too late for Lamley's," said Eleanor.

"They don't shut till seven," said Rose.

"Then ask Martin to go with you," said Eleanor.

The little girl moved off slowly towards the door. Eleanor took up her account-books again.

"But you're not to go alone, Rose; you're not to go alone," she said, looking up over them as Rose reached the door. Nodding her head in silence, Rose disappeared.

 

 

She went upstairs. She paused outside her mother's bedroom and snuffed the sour-sweet smell that seemed to hang about the jugs, the tumblers, the covered bowls on the table outside the door. Up she went again, and stopped outside the schoolroom door. She did not want to go in, for she had quarrelled with Martin. They had quarrelled first about Erridge and the microscope and then about shooting Miss Pym's cats next door. But Eleanor had told her to ask him. She opened the door.

"Hullo, Martin--" she began.

He was sitting at a table with a book propped in front of him, muttering to himself--perhaps it was Greek, perhaps it was Latin.

"Eleanor told me--" she began, noting how flushed he looked, and how his hand closed on a bit of paper as if he were going to screw it into a ball. "To ask you . . ." she began, and braced herself and stood with her back against the door.

 

 

Eleanor leant back in her chair. The sun now was on the trees in the back garden. The buds were beginning to swell. The spring light of course showed up the shabbiness of the chair-covers. The large armchair had a dark stain on it where her father had rested his head, she noticed. But what a number of chairs there were--how roomy, how airy it was after that bedroom where old Mrs Levy--But Milly and Delia were both silent. It was the question of the dinner-party, she remembered. Which of them was to go? They both wanted to go. She wished people would not say, "Bring one of your daughters." She wished they would say, "Bring Eleanor," or "Bring Milly," or "Bring Delia," instead of lumping them all together. Then there could be no question.

"Well," said Delia abruptly, "I shall . .