And their time went as it had gone before: in sewing together, reading
together, listening to lectures and concerts together. They had told Sarah
that they didn't want anybody to call. They were Hilton Frean's wife and
daughter. "After our wonderful life with him," they said, "you'll
understand, Sarah, that we don't want people." And if Harriett was
introduced to any stranger she accounted for herself arrogantly: "My
father was Hilton Frean."

They were collecting his _Remains_ for publication.

Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker than the
last. And Harriett was thirty-nine.


One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted. That was the
beginning of her illness, February, eighteen eighty-three. First came the
long months of weakness; then the months and months of sickness; then the
pain; the pain she had been hiding, that she couldn't hide any more.

They knew what it was now: that horrible thing that even the doctors were
afraid to name. They called it "something malignant." When the friends--
Mrs. Hancock, Connie Pennefather, Lizzie, and Sarah--called to inquire,
Harriett wouldn't tell them what it was; she pretended that she didn't
know, that the doctors weren't sure; she covered it up from them as if it
had been a secret shame. And they pretended that they didn't know. But
they knew.

They were talking now about an operation. There was one chance for her in
a hundred if they had Sir James Pargeter: one chance. She might die of it;
she might die under the anaesthetic; she might die of shock; she was so old