Papa stood in the doorway. He looked round the small dining-room as if he were still puzzled by its strangeness. Papa was not what he used to be. A streak of grey hair showed above each ear. Grey patches in his brown beard. Scarlet smears in the veined sallow of his eyes. His bursting, violent life had gone. He went stooping and shuffling. The house was too small for Papa. He turned in it as a dog turns in his kennel, feeling for a place to stretch himself. He said, "Where's your mother? I want her." Mary went to find her. She knew the house: the flagged passage from the front door. The dining-room on the right. The drawing-room on the left. In there the chairs and tables drew together to complain of Morfe. View of the blacksmith's house and yard from the front window. From the side window Mamma's garden. Green grass-plot. Trees at the far end. Flowers in the borders: red roses, cream roses, Canterbury bells, white and purple, under the high walls. In a corner an elder bush frothing greenish white on green. Behind the dining-room Papa's tight den. Stairs where the passage turned to the left behind the drawing-room. Glass door at the end, holding the green of the garden, splashed with purple, white and red. The kitchen here in a back wing like a rough barn run out into the orchard. Upstairs Catty's and Cook's room in the wing; Papa's dressing-room above the side passage; Roddy's room above Papa's den. Then the three rooms in front. The one above the drawing-room was nearly filled with the yellow birch-wood wardrobe and bed. The emerald green of the damask was fading into the grey. Her mother was there, sitting in the window-seat, reading the fourteenth chapter of St. John. "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions--" Mamma was different, too, as if she had shrunk through living in the cramped rooms. She raised her head. The head of a wounded bird, very gentle. "Why are you sitting up here all alone?" "Because sometimes I want to be alone." "Shall I spoil the aloneness?" "Not if you're a good girl and keep quiet." Mary sat on the bed and waited till the chapter should be ended. She thought: "She talks to me still as though I were a child. What would she say if I told her about Aunt Charlotte? She wouldn't know what it was really like. She wasn't there. "I shall never tell her." She was thrilled at the thought of her grown-up hardness, her grown-up silence, keeping her mother safe. Mamma looked up and smiled; the chapter was ended; they went downstairs. Papa stood in the doorway of his den and called to Mamma in a queer low voice. The letters-- She went into the dining-room and waited--ten minutes--twenty.