they would look, what they would say and do, and with what gestures. It
would be like the telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that
you know every word of.

She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she had only
asked them to come early in order that they might go early and leave her
to her happiness.

She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and Dorothy
were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought that she
wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they were
coming early. It struck her that this was sad.

* * * * *

Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the
Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and
the yellow clay of the Heath.

"How little they look," Michael said.

Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them
pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the
difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would
be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be
sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying, already, in her
clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't change me." The
utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn't help it.

Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came