Sabrina blinked down at Aunt Effie’s hand on hers— brown, knobby, coarsened, with short thick nails pale against the tanned skin. And then as her father spoke again she turned her head slowly to look at him—scraggy and dry and opinionated, speaking of marriage as though it was something you ordered by post from Selfridge’s. Jog along alone—and forgetful—and complaisant. Get irritable, or silly, or futile. Grow old—like these?

“Some chap with eyes in his head is bound to turn up soon enough, I dare say,” Father was assuring Aunt Effie obstinately. “The child is very like her mother, and Joan was a dashed pretty girl when I married her.”

“Was she happy with you?” asked Sabrina in the dead silence which enveloped his final word.

“Naturally she was,” said Father, without hesitation, but his eyes as they rested on his daughter were guarded and hostile and bleak. “Why shouldn’t she have been?”

“Then why did she die?” queried Sabrina unreasonably, and there was a small gasp from Aunt Effie at the other end of the table.

“Because she had a fall just before you were born,” he stated with brutal simplicity. “You were born too soon. It killed her.”

“Alan—!” Aunt Effie faltered into silence as that bleak, angry gaze came round to her.

“Sabrina is old enough to know these things,” he asserted. “You should have told her long ago.”

“She—she never asked me—”

But now he seemed to have forgotten them both, looking inward unwillingly at the cold cinders of an old, unhappy passion, and at an old sorrow, bitter and unresigned.

“They could have saved her,” he was saying, and his face as they stared at him was savage and strange. “It was her life or the child’s, they said. I told them which it was to be, and the fools did as they pleased—they needn’t have let her die—I begged them not to let her die—”

“Oh, Alan—!” breathed Aunt Effie, sadly, and her foolish, pretty face was puckered with pity as she sat looking at him across the table. “Oh, Alan, I thought—” She thought he had forgotten, after all these years of his coldness and absentmindedness. She hoped even now that he would not remember the surprising words of the young doctor who had been left behind by the specialist to fight the losing battle for Joan’s life. “She isn’t trying!” cried the young doctor in despair. “She won’t help me—!” Even now, Aunt Effie was not sure that Joan might not have been happy if she had lived—that is, Joan might have outgrown her odd, timid ways that seemed almost as though she was—well, afraid of Alan, or possibly didn’t really like him, when anyone could see the poor man wouldn’t hurt a fly, and surely a sister ought to know....