She could see that Mamma did not really want to live in Sidmouth; she didn’t want to be near Aunt Harriett; she wanted the cottage at Hampstead and all the things of their familiar, intellectual life going on and on. After all, that was the way to keep near to Papa, to go on doing the things they had done together. Her mother agreed that it was the way. “I can’t help feeling,” Harriett said, “it’s what he would have wished.” Her mother’s face was quiet and content. She hadn’t guessed. They left the white house with the green balcony hung out like a birdcage at the side, and turned into the cottage at Hampstead. The rooms were small and rather dark, and the furniture they had brought had a squeezed-up, unhappy look. The blue egg on the marble-topped table was conspicuous and hateful as it had never been in the Black’s Lane drawing-room. Harriett and her mother looked at it. “Must it stay there?” “I think so. Fanny Hancock gave it me.” “Mamma--you know you don’t like it.” “No. But after all these years I couldn’t turn the poor thing away.” Her mother was an old woman, clinging with an old, stubborn fidelity to the little things of her past. But Harriett denied it. “She’s not old,” she said to herself. “Not really old.” “Harriett,” her mother said one day. “I think you ought to do the housekeeping.” “Oh, Mamma, why?” She hated the idea of this change. “Because you’ll have to do it some day.” She obeyed. But as she went her rounds and gave her orders she felt that she was doing something not quite real, playing at being her mother as she had played when she was a child. Then her mother had another thought. “Harriett, I think you ought to see more of your friends, dear.” “Why?” “Because you’ll want them after I’m gone.” “I shall never _want_ anybody but you.” And their time went as it had gone before: in sewing together, reading together, listening to lectures and concerts together. They had told Sarah that they didn’t want anybody to call. They were Hilton Frean’s wife and daughter. “After our wonderful life with him,” they said, “you’ll understand, Sarah, that we don’t want people.” And if Harriett was introduced to any stranger she accounted for herself arrogantly: “My father was Hilton Frean.” They were collecting his _Remains_ for publication. Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker than the last. And Harriett was thirty-nine. One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted. That was the beginning of her illness, February, eighteen eighty-three. First came the long months of weakness; then the months and months of sickness; then the pain; the pain she had been hiding, that she couldn’t hide any more.