Yes, it must be Miss Marigold’s wedding that was making her think of the absent Tibbie, thinking so vividly that instead of absent she was very much present. In the little room where the sun kept pushing its way she seemed almost there in the flesh, catching and reflecting the light with her shimmering scissors and silks. The children, too, seemed unaccountably near, so that she felt as if at any moment she might hear their gentle if chattering voices and their sober if pattering feet. Their post-card photographs were on the shelf with that of their mother, seven-year-old Libby and five-year-old Stevie—stiff, grave, patient little people, who looked as if they couldn’t possibly belong to laughing Tibbie. Those who noticed the difference said that they looked as though they had been born protesting against the sorrows of a great war, but those who had known their father and their father’s mother said something else. It was from Stephen Catterall that they inherited their pale, haunted faces and their mournful dark eyes. When Stephen was killed, they said in Whalley that he had always looked as though the hand of death was never far from his tragic face, but those who had known him as a child knew it was never a little thing like death that had made Stephen afraid.... Mrs. Clapham had once been to Whalley to pay her daughter a visit, and once Tibbie and the children had come to Mrs. Clapham, but on neither side had the visit been repeated. One had her charing to think of, and the other her sewing, and both had their other supremely important reasons.... But the result of the separation was that Mrs. Clapham knew very little about Tibbie’s children, except what she was able to learn from Tibbie’s letters. She was fond of them as far as she did know them, and of course proud, but she was always a little puzzled about them, a little uneasy. They were so very unlike what Tibbie had been, or Tibbie’s uncles and aunts; so very unlike what Mrs. Clapham had been herself. But there was no reason to worry about them or their mother, as she knew, seeing that they were comfortably off, and had plenty of neighbours and friends. If it had not been for that she could never have felt this satisfaction in the change which, other individuals being willing, she was shortly proposing to take. She would have been afraid that, as soon as the home was broken up, Tibbie and Co. might possibly want to come back. But there was no chance of such a thing as long as certain circumstances existed; Tibbie would never come. She fretted for her mother sometimes, just as her mother fretted for her, but as long as a certain person remained alive, Tibbie would never come.