This evening, getting the tea for herself and Hubert, she was arranging Christmas holly and ivy on John’s grave when she heard Hubert’s key in the lock, and then the closing of the front door. Now Hubert would go into the back sitting room and light the fire there and sit beside it until she called him to tea. Sometimes she lighted the fire in the back sitting room and sat there herself. This afternoon she had hardly left the kitchen. They burned coal. They kept the coal and the firewood, together with her garden things, in a small wooden shed that was attached to the back of the house. Every day she carried in two scuttles of coal, one made of iron, for the kitchen stove, and one made of brass, for the sitting room. She sometimes wondered, when she lifted the coal, if Hubert had any idea how heavy it was. Now, crossing the kitchen to turn the gas from low to high under the kettle, she saw the brass scuttle standing alongside the stove, filled and ready. She had carried it in and then forgotten to carry it up to the sitting room. She was irritated with herself for forgetting to bring it up and leave it ready for him when he came in. It was a bad sign — to start to be forgetful, to start forgetting things that ought to be done. Well, she wouldn’t give him the chance to come down and ask for it, or to watch her clamber with it up the three steps that led to the hall and the sitting room. He said his heart was bad and that that was why he couldn’t do much of anything that would exert him. But it had been the same when he was forty and thirty and younger. He loved to be waited on.