On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst of all, the dismissals. The house (pending the materialisation of the Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old friendships. Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left, alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with the obliteration of her past life to be her task. An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of her sight for a single instant. The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one's own little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one insignificant segment of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes, to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost. And on Monday afternoon with the early darkness the storm began. There came first a little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out the land. There followed complete stillness; then a few scattered drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling roar, the wind came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of its surprise attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long passages snatching at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows and the