"Many years ago, my love," he said, shaking his head. "And I'm afraid that you've had much to put up with since then. I have wasted my opportunities sadly. I ought to have been in a superb position by now." "I'm sure I don't wish for anything better than what we've got," Mrs. Fawcus declared, trying to sound cheerful. "I'm sure as basements go, one couldn't wish for a nicer basement. It's so lovely and light for one thing." "If I were to die, my dear, I'm convinced that Holland and Brown would offer you the refusal of my post." "Oh, don't talk like that, Mr. Fawcus. Die? What ever next, to be sure?" "_Tempora, mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._ It won't be the same without our Mary." "You're going to make me cry if you keep on keeping on so." Mrs. Fawcus uttered a few warning sniffles. At that moment she, who by her reception of the news had added the last bitterness to the separation, came dancing back from her dolls to whom as a great secret she had been telling about her departure. "Do you think my granny will be like a fairy god-mother?" Mary asked. "Because if she is I shall ask her to wave her magic wand and bring my dear Uncle William and my dear Aunt Lucy to France." "Will you, Mary, will you? But I'm too old and fat to be waved by fairy godmothers," said Mr. Fawcus sadly. Mary began to understand at last that her going away was a grief to her kind guardians, and as she had often done before, when it seemed advisable to propitiate Uncle William, or when Uncle William came downstairs very angry over some new task that Holland and Brown had laid upon him, she asked him a question. "How big is France, Uncle William?" And folding her hands across her clean pinafore she composed herself to listen more attentively to a long account of France than she had ever listened to any of Uncle William's exegetical discourses before. But Uncle William did not answer, and Mary, horrified at his silence, began to cry. "For goodness' sake, child, don't wipe your eyes on your clean pinafore," Mrs. Fawcus sharply adjured her. It was like Mrs. Fawcus to have put Mary into a clean pinafore just to learn that she was to be taken from them. A shaft of sunlight, the first of the year to reach the basement, came glancing through the geraniums in the window and lit up the cosy kitchen; but it was a cruel shaft, for it lit up also the weary lines and the baggy eyes of Mr. Fawcus: it lit up the crows-feet and the wrinkles of his wife; and most cruelly of all it lit up Mary's auburn hair, reminding the old couple that, though the sun might shine all the summer through, here it would never shine again upon that auburn hair.