The enshrouding linen draperies were removed from the house in North Kensington, revealing a taste for furnishing of which the governing principle had obviously been: "Here is a space—fill it!"
For Mrs. Edward Morrison had written, announcing the return of the family:
"We shall be back on Tuesday in time for supper. It must be awful for you alone in the empty house—especially now!"
Then a few advance orders respecting milk to be taken in, and a chicken to be roasted; an ecstatic description of Nicolas in bathing-drawers; and "Your loving sister, Nelly."
There were only two words in the epistle which contained matter for reflection: "especially now."...
Kathleen spent profitably her remaining days of golden solitude in visualizing the long weeks and months to come, when she could no more enter a room with the comfortable security of finding it untenanted.
For soon the Winter-fear would find her out.
An old enemy; she knew it well. It came, inevitable, monotonous, with the fall of the first leaf, the flicker of the first fire. "It's not warm enough for Nicolas without a coat," said Nelly; that was one of the heralds. There were many others. Always it came. The waiting for it was almost the worst. Winter-fear ... oh, the furious beating clenched resentment, resentment of a thousand Indian forefathers, that Kathleen harboured against the creeping cold. Cold that bit. Cold that gnawed. Cold that ached.
Winter-fear brought a special horror to the house in North Kensington. Concentration. Nelly, liberal enough in most matters, had, like all housewives, a special kink; she economized in coals. Except in cases of illness, in the dining-room only was a fire kept alight. And slowly, day by day, as the increasing cold drove them inwards, the entire family concentrated round this fire. Here they worked and read and talked and ate, huddled together in the semicircle of warmth. Kathleen, in an occasional frantic longing for solitude, would break away; retire to her chilly bedroom or to the raw streets, both harbours of refuge in the summer months. Always, numbed to the bone, she was compelled to surrender, return to the dining-room community—till April with soft warm fingers should come to release her.