Just as on the night when her uncle had come into her room she had
fancied that some one spoke to her, so now she seemed to hear:

"Ah, that's a nasty knock for you--a very nasty knock."

Her father had left all his money, with the exception of 300, Pounds
Sterling to Ellen the cook; Maggie did not, for a moment, speculate
as to the probable total amount. Three hundred pounds seemed to her
a very large sum--it would at any rate give her something to begin
life upon--but the thing that seized and held her was the secret
friendship that must have existed between her father and Ellen--
secret friendship was the first form that the relationship assumed
for her. She saw Ellen, red of face with little eyes and a flat nose
upon which flies used to settle, a fat, short neck, the wheezings
and the pantings, the stumping walk, the great broad back. And she
saw her father--first as the tall, dirty man whom she used to know,
with the shiny black trousers, the untidy beard, the frowning eyes,
the nails bitten to the quick, the ragged shirt-cuffs--then as that
veiled shape below the clothes, the lift of the sheet above the
toes, the loins, the stomach, the beard neatly brushed, the closed
yellow eyelids, the yellow forehead, the rats with their gleaming
eyes. In a kind of terror as though she were being led against her
will into some disgusting chamber where the skulls were stale and
the sights indecent, she saw the friendship of those two--Ellen the
cook and her father.

Young, inexperienced though she was, she was old already in a
certain crude knowledge of facts. It could not be said that she
traced to their ultimate hiding-place the relations of her father
and the woman, but in some relation, ugly, sordid, degraded, she saw