_Lady, our Lady, Night, You who give sleep to men, to men labouring and suffering-- Out of the darkness, come, Come with your wings, come down On the house of Agamemnon._ Time stretched out behind and before you, time to read, to make music, to make poems in, to translate Euripides, while Mamma looked after her flowers in the garden; Mamma, sowing and planting and weeding with a fixed, vehement passion. You could hear Catty and little Alice, Maggie's niece, singing against each other in the kitchen as Alice helped Catty with her work. You needn't have been afraid. You would never have anything more to do in the house. Roddy wasn't there. Agamemnon--that was where you broke off two years ago. He didn't keep you waiting long to finish. You needn't have been afraid. Uncle Victor's letter came on the day when the gentians flowered. One minute Mamma had been happy, the next she was crying. When you saw her with the letter you knew. Uncle Victor was sending Dan home. Dan was no good at the office; he had been drinking since Roddy died. Three months. Mamma was saying something as she cried. "I suppose he'll be here, then, all his life, doing nothing." II. Mamma had given Papa's smoking-room to Dan. She kept on going in and out of it to see if he was there. "When you've posted the letters you might go and see what Dan's doing." Everybody in the village knew about Dan. The postmistress looked up from stamping the letters to say, "Your brother was here a minute ago." Mr. Horn, the grocer, called to you from the bench at the fork of the roads, "Ef yo're lookin' for yore broother, he's joost gawn oop daale." If Mr. Horn had looked the other way when he saw you coming you would have known that Dan was in the Buck Hotel. The white sickle of the road; a light at the top of the sickle; the Aldersons' house. A man was crossing from the moor-track to the road. He carried a stack of heather on his shoulder: Jem's brother, Ned. He stopped and stared. He was thicker and slower than Jem; darker haired; fuller and redder in the face; he looked at you with the same little, kind, screwed-up eyes. "Ef yo're lookin' for yore broother, 'e's in t' oose long o' us. Wull yo coom in? T' missus med gev yo a coop o' tea." She went in. There was dusk in the kitchen, with a grey light in the square of the window and a red light in the oblong of the grate. A small boy with a toasting-fork knelt by the hearth. You disentangled a smell of stewed tea and browning toast from thick, deep smells of peat smoke and the sweat drying on Ned's shirt. When Farmer Alderson got up you saw the round table, the coarse blue-grey teacups and the brown glazed teapot on a brown glazed cloth.