es shook from the barrel-organ, round,
bright notes, carelessly scattered.

Constantia lifted her big, cold hands as if to catch them, and then her
hands fell again. She walked over to the mantelpiece to her favourite
Buddha. And the stone and gilt image, whose smile always gave her such
a queer feeling, almost a pain and yet a pleasant pain, seemed to-day
to be more than smiling. He knew something; he had a secret. "I know
something that you don't know," said her Buddha. Oh, what was it, what
could it be? And yet she had always felt there was... something.

The sunlight pressed through the windows, thieved its way in, flashed
its light over the furniture and the photographs. Josephine watched it.
When it came to mother's photograph, the enlargement over the piano, it
lingered as though puzzled to find so little remained of mother, except
the earrings shaped like tiny pagodas and a black feather boa. Why did
the photographs of dead people always fade so? wondered Josephine. As
soon as a person was dead their photograph died too. But, of course,
this one of mother was very old. It was thirty-five years old. Josephine
remembered standing on a chair and pointing out that feather boa to
Constantia and telling her that it was a snake that had killed their
mother in Ceylon... Would everything have been different if mother hadn't
died? She didn't see why. Aunt Florence had lived with them until they
had left school, and they had moved three times and had their yearly
holiday and... and there'd been changes of servants, of course.

Some little sparrows, young sparrows they sounded, chirped on the
window-ledge. "Yeep--eyeep--yeep." But Josephine felt they were not
sparrows, not on the window-ledge. It was inside her, that queer little
crying noise. "Yeep--eyeep--yeep." Ah, what was it crying, so weak and
forlorn?

If mother had lived, might they have married? But there had been nobody
for them to marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian friends before
he quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never met a
single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even if they'd met
them, how could they have got to know men well enough to be more than
strangers? One read of people having adventures, being followed, and so
on. But nobody had ever followed Constantia and her. Oh yes, there had
been one year at Eastbourne a mysterious man at their boarding-house who
had put a note on the jug of hot water outside the