She had been thinking of the hundred pounds.

To have known about it three years and said nothing--to have gone
believing she hadn't two years to live----

_That_ was her secret. That was why she had been so calm when Papa
died. She had known she would have him again so soon. Not two years----

"If I'd been them," Lizzie was saying, "I'd have bitten my tongue out
before I told you. It's no use worrying, Hatty. You did everything that
could be done."

"I know. I know."

She held up her face against them; but to herself she said that everything
had not been done. Her mother had never had her wish. And she had died in
agony, so that she, Harriett, might keep her hundred pounds.



IX


In all her previsions of the event she had seen herself surviving as the
same Harriett Frean with the addition of an overwhelming grief. She was
horrified at this image of herself persisting beside her mother's place
empty in space and time.

But she was not there. Through her absorption in her mother, some large,