She started to stand up, when a warm body touched her leg. It was Bennie, the white terrier, who had come out of his sleep on the rug beside the folding doors to hear a match being struck and a fire beginning. He looked up at her. He had small brown poverty-stricken eyes and limp ears, but the line from his black nose to his chin was fine and square, and she often told the children Bennie had very good blood in him. She put her arm around him and felt how close his bones were to the flat white coils of his fur. She wondered how old he was. You never could tell with a stray, and poor Bennie had been on his last legs when she found him on the street one morning on her way from Mass and took him home. She might have been able to walk past him, but some young boys were tormenting him, and she knew she would never be able to look herself in the face again if she abandoned him to their cruelty. He had been in the house five years now. Sometimes he seemed like a puppy and sometimes he was a very thoughtful, grown-up dog. He was very faithful. He had never once snapped at the children. He had never even snapped at the cats, although Rupert, the big orange one, was very greedy and often put his face into Bennie’s food dish in the hope of finding a morsel there he might fancy for himself. “Good Bennie,” Mrs. Bagot said, and pressed him closer to her side, and he stretched his neck up to her, and the storm of devotion in his eyes could never have found expression in speech. His silence burned with devotion, and so it would as long as he was alive.

She rubbed his shoulder and smiled at him and then she stood up. She moved easily, rising from her knees to stand with no effort, but when she was on her feet she felt dizzy. It was her own fault. She had not bothered to eat anything at breakfast time. She had had a cup of tea when she got up, and then, in the middle of the day, more tea, and that was all. She had felt angry with the children at breakfast time, because while she could feel angry she believed she did not miss them, and then, in the middle of the day, when her false anger, her pretense, had faded, she felt shame at the picture of herself going to trouble over food that the children would not be there to share.