“The creaking on the stairs?”
“Yes.”
Either she was mistaken, or the change for the worse in the weather made it not easy to hear slight noises in the house. The wind was still rising. The passage of it through the great trees in the garden began to sound like the fall of waves on a distant beach. It drove the rain—a heavy downpour by this time—rattling against the windows.
“Almost a storm, isn’t it?” Emily said
Francine’s last question had not been answered yet. She took the earliest opportunity of repeating it:
“Never mind the weather,” she said. “Tell me about your father and mother. Are they both alive?”
Emily’s reply only related to one of her parents.
“My mother died before I was old enough to feel my loss.”
“And your father?”
Emily referred to another relative—her father’s sister. “Since I have grown up,” she proceeded, “my good aunt has been a second mother to me. My story is, in one respect, the reverse of yours. You are unexpectedly rich; and I am unexpectedly poor. My aunt’s fortune was to have been my fortune, if I outlived her. She has been ruined by the failure of a bank. In her old age, she must live on an income of two hundred a year—and I must get my own living when I leave school.”