Mr. May came. It was decided to keep open the theatre. He would find some one else for the piano, some one else to issue the tickets.
In the afternoon arrived Frederick Houghton, James’s cousin and nearest relative. He was a middle-aged, blond, florid, church-going draper from Knarborough, well-to-do and very bourgeois. He tried to talk to Alvina in a fatherly fashion, or a friendly, or a helpful fashion. But Alvina could not listen to him. He got on her nerves.
Hearing the gate bang, she rose and hurried to the window. She was in the drawing-room with her cousin, to give the interview its proper air of solemnity. She saw Ciccio rearing his yellow bicycle against the wall, and going with his head forward along the narrow, dark way of the back yard, to the scullery door.
“Excuse me a minute,” she said to her cousin, who looked up irritably as she left the room.
She was just in time to open the door as Ciccio tapped. She stood on the doorstep above him. He looked up, with a faint smile, from under his black lashes.
“How nice of you to come,” she said. But her face was blanched and tired, without expression. Only her large eyes looked blue in their tiredness, as she glanced down at Ciccio. He seemed to her far away.
“Madame asks how is Mr. Houghton,” he said.
“Father! He died this morning,” she said quietly.
“He died!” exclaimed the Italian, a flash of fear and dismay going over his face.
“Yes—this morning.” She had neither tears nor emotion, but just looked down on him abstractedly, from her height on the kitchen step. He dropped his eyes and looked at his feet. Then he lifted his eyes again, and looked at her. She looked back at him, as from across a distance. So they watched each other, as strangers across a wide, abstract distance.