She had been living alone for the six months since her mother died, in a room near the Heath on her salary of three pounds a week; and she had so many things to think about and to arrange that she often forgot to buy her breakfast. This failing infuriated her, for Sophia liked eating and looked forward to mealtimes.

She had left her father’s house two days after Mrs Garden’s funeral, and had not seen him from that time until the morning when she saw him in the coffin. Aunt Maxine and Uncle Preston, his sister and brother, thought this action of Sophia’s a shocking one. They would probably go for her about it after the funeral. They would also go for Francis, who had approved Sophia’s action, but who could not imitate it because he was still at school; and if Harry had been there they would have gone for Harry, too. Buoyed by a pleasing conviction that it was impossible for them to be in the wrong, they never hesitated to go for anyone.

Sophia thanked her stars that he was not there, because Harry, who was twenty, was a gentle, peace-loving, romantic sort of cuckoo, and not grim and slightly sardonic like Francis and herself.

Sophia stared out of one window; Francis stared out of the other. Aunt Maxine, who sat opposite Francis in her natty mourning suit, studied Sophia’s profile and wondered if she ever thought about boys, and if she was having a love affair with anybody? There’s no fun in her, thought Aunt Maxine regretfully; she would have liked Sophia to think a lot about boys and to be having a very exciting love affair which she would discuss in minute detail with her Aunt Maxine. Sophia was an unnatural sort of girl. Why, when Aunt Maxine was Sophia’s age, she was a regular little pepper pot; couldn’t keep her off the boys. And Sophia ought to be a pepper pot, lord knows, with poor Hartley for a father! As for Francis, he’d never break hearts with a nose that size, and Harry was a softie. The beauty of the family, but undoubtedly a muff. Why, at his age, most young Frenchmen were running several women.

But Uncle Preston, now that he had made Sophia pull her skirt modestly over the hem of her petticoat, had stopped thinking about poor Hartley’s children. He was a great one for modesty, even in times of family crisis; but now he was worried about the will.

Who would get what? Marriot, the family’s solicitor had kept very quiet about the will. No one knew anything. Everyone was pretending not to care a bit, but everyone was also teetering with excitement and trying to find out what everybody else knew, and this, added to a natural feeling of relief at Hartley’s death and a strong desire to interfere with any imprudent arrangements which might have been made on their own behalf by his three children, made the occasion as inwardly exciting as it was outwardly sedate. Certainly, Sophia and Francis were the only people present who felt sick with shock and frozen with the accumulated misery and memories of years.