She feels cheated. He had been so mad underneath. Why hadn’t he battered at the door? What a shame. All that trembling for nothing. He had forgotten her. She shuts the window, and lighting a candle undresses and lets down her hair. She gets into bed. Sleep. Eyes closed. Sleep. Now she would go to sleep. Turns over. Sleep. The lawn. The roses. It can’t have been sheet lightning because there was thunder. Then it had been dangerous. A stands for ant. B stands for bee. C stands for cat. Sitting on Mother’s knee tracing the tummy of a, her hand guiding. Later on Mother tried to teach her other things. It used to be a great game to get as many “I don’t know myself, dear’s,” out of her as possible in the morning. There was the Vicarage pew every Sunday, Mrs. Haye to the left, crazy Kate just behind, then the churchwarden, sniffling, sniffling, and two or three almshouse people. Father always preached out of the green book on the second shelf in the old study, though sometimes he talked about politics. Mrs. Haye would stir violently when she disagreed, which would make Father stutter and Mother angry. Sometimes, though not very often, her son John would come too, he who was blind now. She used to watch him all through the service when he was there. He was so aloof, and there was nothing, no one else to look at. Nothing happened, no one did anything except the organist when she forgot. The service would go slowly on. Weston, the head gardener at Barwood, the only person in the choir, would sing as if he did not care. Father’s voice toiled through the service. Mrs. Haye argued the responses. The organist was paid to come, Weston only came that Mrs. Haye might see that he came. Outside, through the little plain glass window at the side of their pew, the top of an apple tree waved. In summer there were apples on it which she used to pick in her imagination, and any time a bird might fly across, free. The service would go on and finish quite suddenly with a hymn, and then the run home with the blue hills in the distance, with the glimpse, just before the second gate, of the tower of the Abbey church, the greeting of Mrs. Green who was always at her door at the beginning of the last field--no, the last but one, there was the orchard; dinner. It had all gone. Why, since she loved it so? The summers were so wonderful, the winter nights so comfortable. Gone. To-day had ended wrong and had started wrong. Forget in sleep. The bed was too hot, the sheets clung, one leg was hot against the other. Her hair laid hot fingers about her face. She pulled aside the bed-clothes and lay on top of them on her back, a white smudge in the dark. Outside tepid rain poured. This was cooler. There was the clock that used to strike bed-time, half-past six. Had she heard the one stroke? Had she forgotten? But no. “Bed-time, Joan.” “No, I don’t want to.” “Now be a good girl.” To gain time--“Where’s Daddy?”