“I’ve made out,” she told Henrietta, “that I’ve a daily girl, without a character, that’s how I can afford her, in the basement, but I must say it’s made that Jenkins mighty keen on fetching his own boots of a morning, but no lodgers below-stairs is my rule. You look out for Jenkins, my dear. He’s no good. I know his sort.” “Oh, I can manage Mr. Jenkins, too,” Henrietta said, and indeed she made a point of bringing him to the hardly manageable state for the amusement of proving her capacity. She despised him, but not for nothing was she Reginald Mallett’s daughter; and Mr. Jenkins and the butcher and a gloomy old gentleman who emerged from his bedroom to eat, and locked himself up between meals, were the only men she knew. No doubt Mrs. Mallett, placidly sewing, was alive to the attentions and frustrations of Mr. Jenkins and had planned her letter to her sisters-in-law some time before she wrote it, but the idea of parting from her mother never occurred to Henrietta until Miss Stubb alarmed her. “Your mother,” she said poetically, “makes me think of snow melting before the sun. In fact, I can’t look at her without thinking of snow and snowdrops and—and graves. Last spring I said to Mrs. Banks, ‘She won’t see the leaves fall,’ I said, and Mrs. Banks agreed. She has been spared, but take care of her in these cold winds, Miss Henrietta, dear.” “She has a cold, only a cold,” Henrietta said in a dead voice, and she went upstairs. Her mother was in bed, and Henrietta looked down at the thin, pretty face. “How ill are you?” she asked in a threatening manner. “Tell me how ill you are.” “I’ve only got a cold, Henry dear. I shall be up to-morrow.” “Promise you won’t be really ill.” “Why should I be?” “It’s Miss Stubb—saying things.” “Women chatter,” Mrs. Mallett said. “If it’s not scandal, it’s an illness. You ought to know that.” “They might leave you alone, anyway.” “Yes, I wish they would,” Mrs. Mallett said faintly, and dropped back on her pillow. Now, sitting in her father’s room, with her mother only a few weeks dead, she reproached herself for her readiness to be deceived, for her preoccupation with her own affairs and the odious Mr. Jenkins, for the exuberance of life which hid from her the dwindling of her mother’s, and the fact, now so plain, that when Reginald Mallett died his wife’s capacity for struggling was at an end. She had suffered bitterly from the sight of his deterioration and from her failure to prevent it. In his sulky, torturing presence she had desired his absence, but this permanent absence was more than she could bear. And all Henrietta could do was to obey her mother’s injunction to accept help from her aunts, but she had refused the offer of an escort to Radstowe and Nelson Lodge; she would have no highly respectable servant sniffing at the boarding-house—and she would have been bound to sniff in that permanently scented atmosphere—which was, after all, her home. She left with genuine regret, with tears.