Mr. Twycott had never rallied, and now lay in a well-packed cemetery² to the south of the great city, where, if all the dead it contained had stood erect³ and alive, not one would have known him or recognized his name.  The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave, and was now again at school.

 

Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she was in nature though not in years.  She was left with no control over anything that had been her husband’s beyond her modest personal income.  In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he had safeguarded with trustees all he possibly could.  The completion of the boy’s course at the public school, to be followed in due time by Oxford⁵ and ordination⁶, had been all previsioned and arranged, and she really had nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink, and make a business of indolence, and go on weaving and coiling the nut-brown hair, merely keeping a home open for the son whenever he came to her during vacations.

 

Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in his lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa⁸ in the same long, straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced, which was to be hers as long as she chose to live in it.  Here she now resided, looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front, and through the railings at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward over the window-sill on the first floor, stretching her eyes far up and down the vista⁹ of sooty trees, hazy¹⁰ air, and drab house-façades, along which echoed the noises common to a

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