to the dark. One, on the ground floor, showed a golden oblong, skirted
with watery gray where the lamp-light thinned the solid blackness of
the wall.

The three sisters, Mary, Gwendolen and Alice, daughters of James
Cartaret, the Vicar of Garth, were sitting there in the dining-room
behind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In their supine, motionless
attitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen, to happen
so soon that, if there had been anything to do, it was not worth their
while doing it.

All three were alike in the small, broad faces that brooded, half
sullen and half sad; in the wide eyes that watched vaguely; in the
little tender noses, and in the mouths, tender and sullen, too; in the
arch and sweep of the upper lips, the delicate fulness of the lower;
in the way of the thick hair, parted and turned back over the brows in
two wide and shallow waves.

Mary, the eldest, sat in a low chair by the fireside. Her hands were
clasped loosely on the black woolen socks she had ceased to darn.

She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyes
that never let you know what she was thinking. The firelight woke the
flame in her reddish-tawny hair. The red of her lips was turned back
and crushed against the white. Mary was shorter than her sisters, but
she was the one that had the color. And with it she had a stillness
that was not theirs. Mary's face brooded more deeply than their faces,
but it was untroubled in its brooding.

She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh