square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came--and stayed,
deepened--until it shone almost golden.

"The sun's out," said Josephine, as though it really mattered.

A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round,
bright notes, carelessly scattered.

Constantia lifted her big, cold hands as if to catch them, and then her
hands fell again. She walked over to the mantelpiece to her favourite
Buddha. And the stone and gilt image, whose smile always gave her such a
queer feeling, almost a pain and yet a pleasant pain, seemed to-day to be
more than smiling. He knew something; he had a secret. "I know something
that you don't know," said her Buddha. Oh, what was it, what could it be?
And yet she had always felt there was...something.

The sunlight pressed through the windows, thieved its way in, flashed its
light over the furniture and the photographs. Josephine watched it. When
it came to mother's photograph, the enlargement over the piano, it lingered
as though puzzled to find so little remained of mother, except the earrings
shaped like tiny pagodas and a black feather boa. Why did the photographs
of dead people always fade so? wondered Josephine. As soon as a person was
dead their photograph died too. But, of course, this one of mother was
very old. It was thirty-five years old. Josephine remembered standing on
a chair and pointing out that feather boa to Constantia and telling her
that it was a snake that had killed their mother in Ceylon...Would
everything have been different if mother hadn't died? She didn't see why.
Aunt Florence had lived with them until they had left school, and they had
moved three times and had their yearly holiday and...and there'd been
changes of servants, of course.