confused, but clinging to his one idea that "the best thing you can
do, my dear, is to send for your Aunt Anne." There had been the
telegram dispatched to Aunt Anne, and then after that the house had
seemed quite filled with people--ladies who had--wished to know
whether they could help her in any way and even the village butcher
who was there for no reason but stood in the hall rubbing his hands
on his thighs and sniffing. All these persons Maggie surveyed
through a mist. She was calm and collected and empty of all
personality; Maggie Cardinal, the real Maggie Cardinal, was away on
a visit somewhere and would not be back for a time or two.

Then suddenly as the house had filled so suddenly it emptied. Maggie
found that she was desperately tired. She went to bed and slept
instantly. On waking next morning she was aware that it was a most
beautiful winter's day and that there was something strange in the
air. There came to her then very slowly a sense of her father. She
saw him on the one side, persistently as she had found him in his
room, strange, shapeless, with a crumpled face and a dirty beard
that seemed to be more dead than the rest of him. On the other side
she saw him as she had found him in the first days of her
consciousness of the world.

He must have been "jolly" then, large and strong, laughing often,
tossing her, she remembered, to the ceiling, his beard jet-black and
his eyebrows bushy and overhanging. Once that vigour, afterwards
this horror. She shook away from her last vision of him but it
returned again and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like
an ill-omened messenger. And all the life between seemed to be
suddenly wiped away as a sponge wipes figures off a slate. After the
death of her mother she had made the best of her circumstances.