"It's I who thank you, Mrs. Greene. My work is very often both trying and depressing, and to meet with such courage and control as yours is a great stimulus to me." "I'm afraid I'm very old-fashioned," said Mrs. Greene. "I've never learnt to take life so vehemently and rebelliously as young people do nowadays. I sometimes think they lack a sense of humour and proportion. Goodbye and thank you again." She left the room, unhurried and untroubled, oblivious of the fact that she left behind her a man filled with amazement at the dignity and decorum of her generation. As she sat in a taxi on the way to lunch, Sarah Greene was busy with arrangements: first of all she must make an appointment with her solicitors and see to her will. A feeling of warm gratitude to her dead husband shot across her mind as she remembered that he had expressly stated that she was to leave the bulk of his considerable fortune to relations and friends for whom she cared. Lynton was her own of course, both house and land, but she was glad that she was under no moral obligation to leave Greene money to Greenes; she was perfectly free to make life as happy and tranquil as an assured income could make it, for Mary and Roger Dodds. Then a nursing home must be considered. Mrs. Greene suppressed a slight tremor as she thought of the crudity and awkwardness of a death in the house: the embarrassed, tearful servants; the relations whose perfectly sincere grief could not prevent them feeling an intense relief at the approach of a meal, followed by an equally intense shame at the thought of enjoying food with poor Aunt Sarah lying upstairs; the desultory and spasmodic conversations; the whole painful interregnum between normal life before the death occurred and normal life resumed after the funeral. A nursing-home in London would certainly have advantages. Sarah Greene would be able to die as unobstrusively as she hoped she had lived. Before finding her way to the restaurant of the large shop in which she intended to lunch, Mrs. Greene made a few methodical purchases. She had intended to buy half a dozen pairs of the thick woollen stockings which she usually wore for gardening, but in view of her curtailed future she mechanically reduced the order to three. She did not however hesitate to order a new mackintosh, since her old one was worn out, and a future, however short, was unthinkable if it withheld from her the promise of rainy walks on soft November afternoons with dusk dropping behind the long row of beeches that bordered the avenue up to Lynton, the house she had loved and cared for these last forty-five years.