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sisters?"
    Miss Hallowes said gravely, "Only the two brothers, and one is dead."
    "Then you will have a sister in me, and you may confide anything you wish. It's you who seem so young—have you never been in love?"
    Miss Hallowes tried out her new little cough once more. It was not a cold coming on; it was recognition. Miss Bosanquet—
Theodora
—was entering a wilderness of strangling vines. In love? She believed, indeed she knew (and had declared it in Mrs. Conrad's hearing!), that Mr. Conrad's works were imprinted on her heart, and would remain so even after her death. The truth was she had loved him, mutely, for six whole years. Mr. Conrad never guessed it; he saw her, she supposed, as an enigmatically living limb of the Machine, and the operation of the Machine was itself enigmatic to him. But Mrs. Conrad, though simple and prosaic, had strong intuitions and watchful eyes, and ears still more vigilant. It had happened more than once that when Miss Hallowes and the family—it now included baby John—were at dinner, and if Miss Hallowes asked for the butter, Mrs. Conrad would turn away her head.
    But she confessed none of this to, to ... Theodora.
    She said instead, "You may call me Lilian, but please never Lily. And if you should ever write my name, you must write it with one
l,
not two."
    "Then let me have your hand, Lilian."
    Theodora reached over the sugar bowl and fondled the hand she had first touched on the other side of the Master's door. The palm was wide and soft and unprepared for womanly affection.
    "Let us meet again very soon," she said.
    ***
    When Lilian parted from her mother that evening, it was later than she had expected. She had stopped at a butcher's for lamb chops, a treat Mrs. Hallowes relished, and cooked them, and tried to turn the conversation from Warren. Her mother's plaints inevitably led to Warren, and then, predictably, to Lilian and the usual quarrel. Warren had been thirty-seven when he shot himself ("when he was taken," her mother said), exactly the age Lilian was now. To her mother this number was ominous. It signified the end of possibility, the closing down of a life. The dark fate of the unmarried.
    "Thirty-seven! It's no good to be alone, dear, just look at your own poor mum, without another soul in the house. I'd be stone solitary if you didn't come by. And there you are, shut up all day long with that old man, and what future are you to get from it?"
    "Mr. Conrad isn't old. He's fifty-three, and has young children."
    "Yes, and don't I always get an earful, Borys and John, Borys and John. You talk as if they're yours, getting them presents and such. That'd be well and good if you had one or two of your own. Every year you've spent with Mr. Conrad is a year thrown to the winds. I truly think he's wicked, keeping you confined, using you up like that—"
    "Mother, please—"
    "It's not that I haven't looked into that book of stories you gave me this last Christmas, when what I really needed was a nice warm woolen muffler—"
    "Mother, I gave you the muffler too, and a pair of gloves, don't you remember? And you've got your new tea cosy right there on the pot."
    "—that wicked wicked
Heart of Darkness,
such a horrifying tale I never in my life could imagine. What must be in that man's mind!"
    "It's a very great mind. Mr. Conrad is a very great writer. Posterity will treasure him."
    Posterity.
How improbable: that formidable word, how it sprang out in all its peculiar awkwardness, not at all the kind of thing that fit her mother's kitchen—the very word Miss Bos ...
Theodora
... had uttered only hours before.
    "Well, there you're right," her mother said. "The man has sons, that's the only posterity, if you want to say it like that, any normal person ought to care about. And when you lose one of your own, like our Warren—"
    Her mother broke into weeping, and Lilian felt relieved; she was not callous, but she was used to her mother's tears, and