caught a swift glimpse of the doorway which she had not seen since the bright morning she closed the door on the frivolous little room of Madame Nozières. Ah, she knew how it looked! She knew each tiny thing about it, and the gray courtyard with the summer furniture heaped into one corner. It was cruel, incredible . . . what she had to do.
Before they drew up to the door of the house in the Rue Raynouard, Hattie too had grown silent under the gray depression which claimed all the little party.
They had tea on the white terrace where they found the black dog and poor tottering old Criquette and were joined by Jean and Monsieur de Cyon, and Rebecca, whose sulkiness did nothing to raise the spirits of the party. It was, Lily remarked, as she sat behind a table laden with silver and flowers sent up from Germigny and the most delicate sandwiches of pâté and cheese and jam, like a great family reunion. The big house was full now; Lily was married, even with distinction. There were no more secrets. In some ways life had grown simple, yet in others its complexity had been increased, again and again.
Ellen, sitting there in her own pool of tragic silence, watched them all with the old knowledge that their lives were all in some way entangled and bound up together . . . all that absurd and ill assorted group, Monsieur de Cyon, gentle and white haired, Hattie, Rebecca, Jean, Lily, Callendar and herself; and even Gramp who had disappeared already into the solitude of the room which Lily had given him. Here they all were, most of them—even de Cyon, himself, a foreigner—living on the wealth poured out by the black mills of a town in the Midlands of America. And she it was who had brought them together.
Watching her mother, it occurred to her that the indomitable Hattie was no longer young. She would ask presently to be shown the room where Fergus had died, and Ellen, still lying, would show it to her, and her mother would weep and be satis-
