Aunt Liz anywhere," Olwen declared, loath to have her sister
charged with unfaithfulness.

"What do you think, Charlie?" asked Jennie.

The young man stiffened his slender body and inclined his pale face and
rubbed his nape, and he proclaimed that there was no discourse of which
the meaning was hidden from him and no device with which he was not
familiar; and he answered: "I would stick on the spot."

That night Olwen made her customary address to God, and before she came
up from her knees or uncovered her eyes, she extolled to God the acts
of her father Adam. But slumber kept from her because of that which
Jennie had spoken; and diffiding the humor of her heart, she said to
herself: "Liz must have a chance of going on with some work." At that
she slept; and early in the day she was in Cartref.

"Jennie and Charlie insist you rest," she told Lisbeth. "She can manage
quite nicely, and there's Charlie which is a help. So should any one who
is twenty-three."

For a week the daughters waited on their father and contrived they never
so wittily to free him from his disorder--Did they not strip and press
against him?--they could not deliver him from the wind of dead men's
feet. They stitched black cloth into garments and while they stitched
they mumbled the doleful hymns of Sion. Two yellow plates were fixed on
Adam's coffin--this was in accordance with the man's request--and the
engraving on one was in the Welsh tongue, and on the other in the
English tongue, and the reason was this: that the angel who lifts the
lid--be he of the English or of the Welsh--shall know immediately that
the dead is of the people chosen to have the first seats in the Mansion.

The sisters removed from Cartref such things as pleased them; Lisbeth
chose more than Olwen, for her house was bare; and in the choosing each
gave in to the other, and neither harbored a mean thought.

With her chattels and her sewing machine, Lisbeth entered number seven,
which is in Park Villas, and separated from the railway by a wood
paling, and from then on the sisters lived by the rare fruits of their
joint industry; and never, except on the Sabbath, did they shed their
thimbles or the narrow bright scissors which hung from their waists.
Some of the poor middle-class folk near-by brought to them their
measures of materials, and the more honorable folk who dwelt in the
avenues beyond Upper Richmond Road crossed the steep railway bridge
with blouses and skirts to