One day she made Maggie pull off the old, washed-out cretonne covers, exposing the faded blue rep. She was back in the drawing-room of her youth. Only one thing was missing. She went upstairs and took the blue egg out of the spare room and set it in its place on the marble-topped table. She sat gazing at it a long time in happy, child-like satisfaction. The blue egg gave reality to her return. When she saw Maggie coming in with the tea and buttered scones she thought of her mother. Three more years. Harriett was sixty-eight. She had a faint recollection of having given Maggie notice, long ago, there, in the dining room. Maggie had stood on the hearthrug, in her large white apron, crying. She was crying now. She said she must leave and go and take care of her mother. “Mother’s getting very feeble now.” “I’m getting very feeble, too, Maggie. It’s cruel and unkind of you to leave me.” “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help it.” She moved about the room, sniffing and sobbing as she dusted. Harriett couldn’t bear it any more. “If you can’t control yourself,” she said, “go into the kitchen.” Maggie went. Harriett sat before the fire in her chair, straight and stiff, making no sound. Now and then her eyelids shook, fluttered red rims; slow, scanty tears oozed and fell, their trail glistening in the long furrows of her cheeks. XV The door of the specialist’s house had shut behind them with a soft, respectful click. Lizzie Pierce and Harriett sat in the taxicab, holding each other’s hands. Harriett spoke. “He says I’ve got what Mamma had.” Lizzie blinked away her tears; her hand loosened and tightened on Harriett’s with a nervous clutch. Harriett felt nothing but a strange, solemn excitement and exaltation. She was raised to her mother’s eminence in pain. With every stab she would live again in her mother. She had what her mother had. Only she would have an operation. This different thing was what she dreaded, the thing her mother hadn’t had, and the going away into the hospital, to live exposed in the free ward among other people. That was what she minded most. That and leaving her house, and Maggie’s leaving. She cried when she saw Maggie standing at the gate in her white apron as the taxicab took her away. She thought, “When I come back again she won’t be there.” Yet somehow she felt that it wouldn’t happen; it was impossible that she should come back and not find Maggie there. She lay in her white bed in the white-curtained cubicle. Lizzie was paying for the cubicle. Kind Lizzie. Kind. Kind. She wasn’t afraid of the operation. It would happen in the morning. Only one thing worried her. Something Connie had told her. Under the anæsthetic you said things. Shocking, indecent things. But there wasn’t anything she could say. She didn’t know anything.... Yes. She did. There were Connie’s stories. And Black’s Lane. Behind the dirty blue palings in Black’s Lane.