eyes tight shut.

To-night she heard voices at the door and somebody else's feet going
tip-toe behind Aunt Adeline's. Somebody else whispered "She's asleep."
That was Jerrold. Jerrold. She felt him standing beside his mother,
looking at her, and her eyelids fluttered; but she lay still.

"She isn't asleep at all," said Aunt Adeline. "She's shamming, the
little monkey."

Jerrold thought he knew why. He turned into the old nursery that was the
schoolroom now, and found Eliot there, examining a fly's leg under his
microscope. It was Eliot that he wanted..

"I say, you know, Mum's making a jolly mistake about that kid. Trying to
go on as if she was Anne's mother. You can see it makes her sick. It
would me, if my mother was dead."

Eliot looked as if he wasn't listening, absorbed in his fly's leg.

"Somebody's got to tell her."

"Are you going to," said Eliot, "or shall I?"

"Neither. I shall get Dad to. He'll do it best."


vii

Robert Fielding didn't do it all at once. He put it off till Adeline