"Not altogether bad news," I said to myself; "my mother is dead, but I have been saved the useless pain, the torture of spirit, I should have endured if I had arrived in time." China roses used to grow over the railings; very few blooms were left. I noticed just a few as I ran up the high steps, asking myself why I could not put the past behind me. If ever there was a time to live in the present this was one; but never was the present further from me and the past clearer than when I opened the hall door and stood in the hall paved with grey stones and painted grey and blue. Three generations had played there; in that corner I had learned to spin my first top, and I had kept on trying, showing a perseverance that amazed my father. He said, "If he will show as much perseverance in other things as he does in the spinning of a top, he will not fail." He used to catch me trying and trying to spin that top when he came downstairs on his way to the stables to see his beloved racehorses; that is the very chair on which he used to put his hat and gloves. In those days tall hats were worn in the country, and it was the business of his valet to keep them well brushed. How the little old man used to watch me, objecting in a way to my spinning my top in the hall, fearful lest I should overturn the chair on which the hat stood: sometimes that did happen, and then, oh dear!
In search of some one I opened the drawing-room door. My sister was there, and I found her on a sofa weeping for our mother, who had died that morning. We are so constituted that we demand outward signs of our emotions, especially of grief; we are doubtful of its genuineness unless it is accompanied by sighs and tears; and that, I suppose, is why my sister's tears were welcomed by me, for, truth to tell, I was a little shocked at my own insensibility. This was stupid of me, for I knew through experience that we do not begin to suffer immediately after the accident; everything takes time, grief as well as pain. But in a moment so awful as the one I am describing one does not reflect; one falls back on the convention that grief and tears are inseparable as fire and smoke. If I could not weep it were well that my sister could, and I accepted her tears as a tribute paid to our mother's goodness--a goodness which never failed, for it was instinctive. It even seemed to me a pity that Nina had to dry her eyes so that she might tell me the sad facts--when mother died, of her illness, and the specialist that had not arrived in time. I learned that some one had blundered--not that that mattered much, for mother would not have submitted to an operation.