Poor Miss Pinnegar dwindled, convinced.
“You make it hard for me, in Woodhouse,” she said, hopeless.
“Never mind,” said Alvina, kissing her. “Woodhouse isn’t heaven and earth.”
“It’s been my home for forty years.”
“It’s been mine for thirty. That’s why I’m glad to leave it.” There was a pause.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Miss Pinnegar, “about opening a little business in Tamworth. You know the Watsons are there.”
“I believe you’d be happy,” said Alvina.
Miss Pinnegar pulled herself together. She had energy and courage still.
“I don’t want to stay here, anyhow,” she said. “Woodhouse has nothing for me any more.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” said Alvina. “I think you’d be happier away from it.”
“Yes—probably I should—now!”
None the less, poor Miss Pinnegar was grey-haired, she was almost a dumpy, odd old woman.
They went downstairs. Miss Pinnegar put on the kettle.
“Would you like to see the house?” said Alvina to Ciccio.
He nodded. And she took him from room to room. His eyes looked quickly and curiously over everything, noticing things, but without criticism.
“This was my mother’s little sitting-room,” she said. “She sat here for years, in this chair.”
“Always here?” he said, looking into Alvina’s face.
“Yes. She was ill with her heart. This is another photograph of her. I’m not like her.”
“Who is that?” he asked, pointing to a photograph of the handsome, white-haired Miss Frost.
“That was Miss Frost, my governess. She lived here till she died. I loved her—she meant everything to me.”
“She also dead—?”
“Yes, five years ago.”
They went to the drawing-room. He laid his hand on the keys of the piano, sounding a chord.
“Play,” she said.
He shook his head, smiling slightly. But he wished her to play. She sat and played one of Kishwégin’s pieces. He listened, faintly smiling.
“Fine piano—eh?” he said, looking into her face.
“I like the tone,” she said.
“Is it yours?”
“The piano? Yes. I suppose everything is mine—in name at least. I don’t know how father’s affairs are really.”
He looked at her, and again his eye wandered over the room. He saw a little coloured portrait of a child with a fleece of brownish-gold hair and surprised eyes, in a pale-blue stiff frock with a broad dark-blue sash.
“You?” he said.
“Do you recognize me?” she said. “Aren’t I comical?”
She took him upstairs—first to the monumental bedroom.
“This was mother’s room,” she said. “Now it is mine.”
He looked at her, then at the things in the room, then out of the window, then at her again. She flushed, and hurried to show him his room, and the bathroom. Then she went downstairs.
He kept glancing up at the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms, taking in the size and proportion of the house, and the quality of the fittings.
“It is a big house,” he said. “Yours?”
“Mine in name,” said Alvina. “Father left all to me—and his debts as well, you see.”
“Much debts?”
“Oh yes! I don’t quite know how much. But perhaps more debts than there is property. I shall go and see the lawyer in the morning. Perhaps there will be nothing at all left for me, when everything is paid.”
She had stopped on the stairs, telling him this, turning round to him, who was on the steps above. He looked down on her, calculating. Then he smiled sourly.
“Bad job, eh, if it is all gone—!” he said.
“I don’t mind, really, if I can live,” she said.
He spread his hands, deprecating, not understanding. Then he glanced up the stairs and along the corridor again, and downstairs into the hall.
“A fine big house. Grand if it was yours,” he said.
“I wish it were,” she said rather pathetically, “if you like it so much.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Hé!” he said. “How not like it!”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I think it’s a gloomy miserable hole. I hate it. I’ve lived here all my life and seen everything bad happen here. I hate it.”
“Why?” he said, with a curious, sarcastic intonation.
“It’s a bad job it isn’t yours, for certain,” he said, as they entered the living-room, where Miss Pinnegar sat cutting bread and butter.
“What?” said Miss Pinnegar sharply.
“The house,” said Alvina.
“Oh well, we don’t know. We’ll hope for the best,” replied Miss Pinnegar, arranging the bread and butter on the plate. Then, rather tart, she added: “It is a bad job. And a good many things are a bad job, besides that. If Miss Houghton had what she ought to have, things would be very different, I assure you.”
“Oh yes,” said Ciccio, to whom this address was directed.
“Very different indeed. If all the money hadn’t been—lost—in the way it has, Miss Houghton wouldn’t be playing the piano, for one thing, in a cinematograph show.”
“No, perhaps not,” said Ciccio.
“Certainly not. It’s not the right thing for her to be doing, at all!”
“You think not?” said Ciccio.
“Do you imagine it is?” said Miss Pinnegar, turning point blank on him as he sat by the fire.
He looked curiously at Miss Pinnegar, grinning slightly.
“Hé!” he said. “How do I know!”
“I should have thought it was obvious,” said Miss Pinnegar.
“Hé!” he ejaculated, not fully understanding.
“But of course those that are used to nothing better can’t see anything but what they’re used to,” she said, rising and shaking the crumbs from her black silk apron, into the fire. He watched her.
Miss Pinnegar went away into the scullery. Alvina was laying a fire in the drawing-room. She came with a dustpan to take some coal from the fire of the living-room.
“What do you want?” said Ciccio, rising. And he took the shovel from her hand.
“Big, hot fires, aren’t they?” he said, as he lifted the burning coals from the glowing mass of the grate.
“Enough,” said Alvina. “Enough! We’ll put it in the drawing-room.” He carried the shovel of flaming, smoking coals to the other room, and threw them in the grate on the sticks, watching Alvina put on more pieces of coal.
“Fine, a fire! Quick work, eh? A beautiful thing, a fire! You know what they
