Catherine was like a child with a new toy. And this toy was the most intricate, complicated, and absorbingly interesting toy that had ever brought ecstasy to its possessor. How strange that he should be in love with her! How marvellous that there should be something strange and indefinable in her that had attracted something strange and indefinable in him! And she thought, in spasms amidst her exhilaration: “Probably Ransomes will sell the furniture for me.... He killed himself for me. I’m the reason....” It tickled her egoism that he should have done so. He must have done so. It could only have been that. Here was George Trant, head over heels in love with her. And here was her father, stupid, narrow-minded, uncompromising bigot, yet committing suicide because she had run away from home. She preferred to regard herself as a runaway rather than as a castaway. Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable personage!... § 2 As she entered the side door of No. 14, Gifford Road at the improper hour of three a.m., the thin voice of Mrs. Carbass called down the stairs: “That you, Miss Weston?” “Yes.” “There’s a telegraph for you on the table....” “Righto!” How jaunty! How delightfully nonchalant! As if one were used to receiving telegrams! As if one were even used to arriving home at three a.m.! Catherine turned the tap of the gas, which had been left burning at a pin-point in the basement sitting-room. Her hand must have been unsteady, for she turned it out. That necessitated fumbling for matches.... The telegram was addressed to the Upton Rising Cinema, and had been handed in at Bockley Post Office some twelve hours before. It ran: Father had accident. Come at once.--MAY. Now who was May? After much cogitation Catherine remembered an Aunt May, her mother’s sister, who lived at Muswell Hill. Catherine had seen her but once, and that was on the occasion of her mother’s funeral. She had a vague recollection of a prim little woman about fifty, with a high-necked blouse and hair done up in a knob at the back. Catherine decided to go as soon as possible the following day. She went quietly to bed, but found it impossible to sleep. She was strangely exhilarated. She felt like a public-school boy on the eve of the breaking-up morning. New emotions were in store for her, and she, the epicure, delighted in new and subtle emotions. Yet even with her exhilaration there was a feeling of doubt, of misgiving, of uneasiness as to the nature of her own soul. Was she really heartless? How was it she had never grieved at her mother’s death? Try as she would, she could not detect in her feelings for her father anything much more than excitement, curiosity, amazement, even in a kind of way admiration, at what he had done. She felt he had done something infinitely bigger than himself. For the first time in her life she felt towards him impersonally, as she might have done towards any stranger: “I should like to have known that man.”