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By Root 304 0

out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. ‘Buried. You two girls had me buried!’ She heard his stick thumping. Oh, what would they say? What possible excuse could they make? It sounded such an appallingly heartless thing to do. Such a wicked advantage to take of a person because he happened to be helpless at the moment. The other people seemed to treat it all as a matter of course. They were strangers; they couldn’t be expected to understand that father was the very last person for such a thing to happen to. No, the entire blame for it all would fall on her and Constantia. And the expense, she thought, stepping into the tight-buttoned cab. When she had to show him the bills. What would he say then?

She heard him absolutely roaring, ‘And do you expect me to pay for this gimcrack excursion of yours?’

‘Oh,’ groaned poor Josephine aloud, ‘we shouldn’t have done it, Con!’

And Constantia, pale as a lemon in all that blackness, said in a frightened whisper, ‘Done what, Jug?’

‘Let them bu-bury father like that,’ said Josephine, breaking down and crying into her new, queer-smelling mourning handkerchief.

‘But what else could we have done?’ asked Constantia wonderingly. ‘We couldn’t have kept him, Jug – we couldn’t have kept him unburied. At any rate, not in a flat that size.’

Josephine blew her nose; the cab was dreadfully stuffy.

‘I don’t know,’ she said forlornly. ‘It is all so dreadful. I feel we ought to have tried to, just for a time at least. To make perfectly sure. One thing’s certain’ – and her tears sprang out again – ‘father will never forgive us for this – never!’

VI

Father would never forgive them. That was what they felt more than ever when, two mornings later, they went into his room to go through his things. They had discussed it quite calmly. It was even down on Josephine’s list of things to be done. Go through father’s things and settle about them. But that was a very different matter from saying after breakfast:

‘Well, are you ready, Con?’

‘Yes, Jug – when you are.’

‘Then I think we’d better get it over.’

It was dark in the hall. It had been a rule for years rever to disturb father in the morning, whatever happened. And now they were going to open the door without knocking even… Constartia’s eyes were enormous at the idea; Josephine felt weak in the knees.

‘You – you go first,’ she gasped, pushing Constantia.

But Constantia said, as she always had said on those occasions, ‘No, Jug, that’s not fair. You’re eldest.’

Josephine was just going to say – what at other times she wouldn’t have owned to for the world – what she kept for her very last weapon, ‘But you’re tallest,’ when they noticed that the kitchen door was open, and there stood Kate…

‘Very stiff,’ said Josephine, grasping the door-handle and doing her best to turn it. As if anything ever deceived Kate!

It couldn’t be helped. That girl was… Then the door was shut behind them, but – but they weren’t in father’s room at all. They might have suddenly walked through the wall by mistake into a different flat altogether. Was the door just behind them? They were too frightened to look. Josephine knew that if it was it was holding itself right shut; Constantia felt that, like the doors in dreams, it hadn’t any handle at all. It was the coldness which made it so awful. Or the whiteness – which? Everything was covered. The blinds were down, a cloth hung over the mirror, a sheet hid the bed; a huge fan of white paper filled the fireplace. Constantia tim: dy put out her hand; she almost expected a snowflake to fall. Josephine felt a queer tingling in her nose, as if her nose was freezing. Then a cab klop-klopped over the cobbles below, and the quiet seemed to shake into little pieces.

‘I had better pull up a blind,’ said Josephine bravely.

‘Yes, it might be a good idea,’ whispered Constantia.

They only gave the blind a touch, but it flew up and the cord flew after, rolling round the blind-stick, and the little tassel tapped as if trying to get free. That was too much for Constantia.

‘Don’t you think – don’t you think we