They hadn't used the drawing-room since Papa died. It was so bright, so heartlessly cheerful compared with the other rooms, you could see that Mamma would think you unfeeling if you wanted to sit in it when Papa was dead. She had told Catty not to light the fire and to keep the door shut, for fear you should be tempted to sit in it and forget. The piano. Under the lid the keys were stiffening with the damp. The hammers were swelling, sticking together. She tried not to think of the piano. She turned her back on it and stood by the side window that looked out on to the garden. Mamma's garden. It mouldered between the high walls blackened by the thaw. On the grass-plot the snow had sunk to a thin crust, black-pitted. The earth was a black ooze through ulcers of grey snow. She had a sudden terrifying sense of desolation. Her mind clutched at this feeling and referred it to her father. It sent out towards him, wherever he might be, a convulsive emotional cry. "You were wrong. I do care. Can't you see that I can never be happy again? Yet, if you could come back I would be happy. I wouldn't mind your--your little funny ways." It wasn't true. She _would_ mind them. If he were really there he would know it wasn't true. She turned and looked again at the piano. She went to it. She opened the lid and sat down before it. Her fingers crept along the keyboard; they flickered over the notes of the Sonata _Appassionata_, a ghostly, furtive playing, without pressure, without sound. And she was ashamed as if the piano were tempting her to some cruel, abominable sin. XXII I. The consultation had lasted more than an hour. From the cobbled square outside you could see them through the window, Mamma, Uncle Edward, Uncle Victor and Farmer Alderson, sitting round the dining-room table and talking, talking, talking about Roddy. It was awful to think that things--things that concerned you--could go on and be settled over your head without your knowing anything about it. She only knew that Papa had made Uncle Victor and Uncle Edward the trustees and guardians of his children who should be under age at his death (she and Roddy were under age), and that Mamma had put the idea of farming in Canada into Uncle Edward's head, and that Uncle Victor had said he wouldn't hear of letting Roddy go out by himself, and that the landlord of the Buck Hotel had told Victor that Farmer Alderson's brother Ben had a big farm somewhere near Montreal and young Jem Alderson was going out to him in March and they might come to some arrangement. They were coming to it now. Roddy and she, crouching beside each other on the hearthrug in the drawing-room, waited till it should be over. Through the shut doors they could still distinguish Uncle Edward's smooth, fat voice from Uncle Victor's thin one. The booming and baying were the noises made by Farmer Alderson. "I can't think what they want to drag _him_ in for," Roddy said. "It'll only make it more unpleasant for them."