eyes fixed on her husband's implacable face, but holding fast to her
daughter's hand, as though she wanted to carry the pressure of those
loving fingers into the grave.

A clock on the mantel-piece ticked loudly. But it was the only sound which
disturbed the quietness of the room. The representatives of the family
eyed one another with guarded indifference. Circumstances had kept them
apart for many years, and they now met almost as strangers.

Mrs. Pendleton sat on a sofa with her husband. She was a notable outline
of a woman, large and massive, with a shrewd capable face and a
middle-class mind. She lived, when at home, in the rarefied atmosphere of
Golders Green, in a red house with a red-tiled roof, one of a streetful
similarly afflicted, where she kept two maids and had a weekly reception
day. She was childless, but she disdained to carry a pet dog as
compensation for barrenness. Her husband was a meagre shrimp of a
stockbroker under his wife's control, who golfed on Sundays and played
auction bridge at his club twice a week with cyclic regularity. He and his
wife had little in common except the habit of living together, which had
made them acquainted with each other's ways.

Mrs. Pendleton had not seen either of her brothers for a long time. Robert
had been too engrossed in digging into the past for the skeletons of his
ancestors to do more than write intermittent letters to the living members
of his family, acquainting them with the progress of his search. Austin
Turold, Robert's younger brother, had spent a portion of his life in India
and had but recently returned. He had gone there more than twenty years
before to fill a Government post, taking with him his young wife, but
leaving his son at school in England for some years. His wife had
languished and died beneath an Indian sun, but her husband had become