Cicely went through a garden door opening on to a stone-floored passage which ran right through the house, and opened the door of her aunts' parlour. They were sitting on either side of the fireless grate with their tea-table not yet cleared between them. Aunt Ellen, ninety-three years of age, with a lace cap on her head and a white silk shawl over her shoulders, was sitting upright in her low chair, knitting. She wore no glasses, and her old hands, meagre, almost transparent, with large knuckles, and skin that looked as if it had been polished, fumbled a little with her needles and the thick wool. Her eyesight was failing, though in the pride of her great age she would not acknowledge it; but her hearing was almost perfect. Aunt Laura, who was seventy-five, looked, except for her hair, which was not quite white, the older of the two. She was bent and frail, and she had taken to spectacles some years before, to which Aunt Ellen alluded every day of her life with contempt. They said the same things to each other, on that and on other subjects, time after time. Every day for years Aunt Ellen had said that if dear Edward had only been able to cut down the trees in front of the house it would give them more light and open up the view, and she had said it as if it had only just occurred to her. And Aunt Laura had replied that she had thought the same thing herself, and did Ellen remember how dear Anne, who was always one to say out what she wanted, had asked him if he thought it might be done, but he had said--quite kindly--that the trees had always been there, and there they would stay. The two old ladies welcomed Cicely as if she had been a princess with whom it was their privilege to be on terms of affectionate intimacy. She was, in fact, a princess in their little world, the daughter of the reigning monarch, to whom they owed, and gave, loyal allegiance. Aunt Laura had been up to the house that morning and heard that they were to return by the half-past four o'clock train. They had been quite sure that Cicely would come to see them at once and tell them all her news, and they had debated whether they would wait for their own tea or not. They had, in fact, waited for a quarter of an hour. They told her all this in minute detail, and only by painstaking insistence was Aunt Ellen herself prevented from rising to ring the bell for a fresh supply to be brought in. "Well, my dear, if you are quite sure you won't," she said at last, "I will ring for Rose to take the things away."