“Well, we can’t postpone it again,” said Josephine. “If we postpone it this time—”

XII

But at that moment in the street below a barrel organ struck up. Josephine and Constantia sprang to their feet together.

“Run, Con,” said Josephine. “Run quickly. There’s sixpence on the—”

Then they remembered. It didn’t matter. They would never have to stop the organ grinder again. Never again would she and Constantia be told to make that monkey take his noise somewhere else. Never would sound that loud, strange bellow when father thought they were not hurrying enough. The organ grinder might play there all day and the stick would not thump.

It never will thump again,
It never will thump again,

played the barrel organ.

What was Constantia thinking? She had such a strange smile; she looked different. She couldn’t be going to cry.

“Jug, Jug,” said Constantia softly, pressing her hands together. “Do you know what day it is? It’s Saturday. It’s a week today, a whole week.”

A week since father died,
A week since father died,

cried the barrel organ. And Josephine, too, forgot to be practical and sensible; she smiled faintly, strangely. On the Indian carpet there fell a square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came—and stayed, deepened—until it shone almost golden.

“The sun’s out,” said Josephine, as though it really mattered.

A perfect fountain of bubbling notes 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 today 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.