“Oh, I’m afraid I couldn’t come. It would be impossible.” “Oh no. You must come. I shall ask Aunt Lucy to write to Miss Perne.” “I really couldn’t come. I shouldn’t be able to ask you back.” “That doesn’t matter,” panted the relentless voice. “I’ve wanted to speak to you ever since you came.” 3 When next Miriam saw the black-robed Brooms and their aunt file past the transept where were the Wordsworth House sittings, she felt that to visit them might perhaps not be the ordeal she had not dared to picture. It would be strange. Those three heavy black-dressed women. Their small new house. She imagined them sitting at tea in a little room. Why was Grace so determined that she should sit there too? Grace had a life and a home and was real. She did not know that things were awful. Nor did Florrie Broom, nor the aunt. But yet they did not look like ‘social’ people. They were a little different. Not worldly. Not pious either. Nor intellectual. What could they want with her? She had soon forgotten them and the congregation assumed its normal look. As the service went on the thoughts came that came every Sunday. An old woman with a girl at her side were the only people whose faces were within Miriam’s line of vision from her place at the wall end of the Wordsworth House pew. The people in front of them were not even in profile, and those behind were hidden from her by the angle of the transept wall. To her right she could just see rising above the heads in the rows of pews in front of her the far end of the chancel screen. The faces grouped in the transept on the opposite side of the church were a blur. The two figures sat or knelt or stood in a heavy silence. They neither sang nor prayed. Their faces remained unaltered during the whole service. To Miriam they were its most intimate part. During the sermon she rarely raised her eyes from the circle they filled for her as they sat thrown into relief by the great white pillar. Their faces were turned towards the chancel. They could see its high dim roof and distant altar, the light on the altar, flowers, shining metal, embroideries, the maze of the east window, the white choir. They showed no sign of seeing these things. The old woman’s heavy face with its heavy jaw-bone seemed to have been dead for years under its coffin-shaped black bonnet. Her large body was covered by a mantle of thickly ribbed black material trimmed with braid and bugles. That bright yellow colour meant liver. Whatever she had she was dying of it. People were always dying when they looked like that. But it was a bad way to die. The real way was the way of that lady trailing about over the Heath near Roehampton, dying by inches of an internal complaint, with her face looking fragile--like the little alabaster chapelle in the nursery with a candle alight inside. She was going to die, walking about alone on the Heath in the afternoons. Her