He smiled, a wry smile. "We're making some headway," he vouchsafed, "but of course we've only begun really--" Molly took to herself no comfort from his casual tone. She fixed an inquiring eye on the lawyer's despondent shoulders and went out without another word. But back in the kitchen she thumped her bread outrageously as she kneaded it, "Lawyers is the numbskull boys," she grumbled, "I belave none of them know their business--" Half past ten o'clock, eleven o'clock, half past eleven--Felicia still knitted, she could no longer see what she was knitting. Her eyes were blurred with unshed tears. It wasn't for herself that she cared, it was for all of the rest of them. From the stairway she could hear Molly's voice comforting the Architect's wife as they helped her down from the nursery to Maman's room, "Sure, they's no need to worry. Take a peep through the door at Miss Felice. She's just knitting whilst they confab. Sure wid a couple o' hundred papers alyin' there they couldn't get through in no hurry now, could they?" She managed to wave her hand gaily as they passed but her heart beat rebelliously. "I just can't, can't, can't give up their house--oh, wherever could I put them all? I couldn't take them to the House in the Woods. I couldn't let them go back--oh, oh, I can't lose their house--" Out of the mass of things that the Portia Person had tried to make clear to her Felicia could only grasp this; that the house was hers but the taxes and interest and fines must all be paid if it were to remain hers; that Certain Legal Matters had really taken everything that had been left her from the Montrose estate; that he couldn't be found; that there was some other property and money somewhere in France; that the Portia Person had seen some of the papers concerning it when he was a young lawyer, when Felice was a little girl; that these papers had been put into Mademoiselle's hands for safe-keeping when Maman went away; that Mademoiselle D'Ormy was to give them to Felicia when Felicia was eighteen. But though they had ransacked every paper that they could find in the old boxes and the cupboards they could find nothing that had any bearing on the case. Of course there was more than a possibility that Felicia might find something among Major Trenton's effects. The Portia Person was sure that another thirty days' stay could be secured to enable Felicia to go to the House in the Woods and see if she could find anything, but she made it quite clear to them that the old man's mental condition precluded the probability that he could be of any help to them. "It's not fair--it's not fair--" her tempestuous heart beat angrily, "Always when I seem to find what I must have, it is as though I had found nothing. This is worse than when I lost Dudley Hamilt--it's not fair--" She spoke the last three words aloud in her intensity, so bitterly, that the two men, packeting together the papers, turned quickly.