Page:Encounters (Bowen).djvu/108

 Cicely was silent.

Herbert brushed the crumbs out of the creases in his waistcoat.

"Poor mother," he unctuously remarked.

"Come and see the house," said Cicely—she was aware that her quick speech shattered what should have been a little silence sacred to the memory of the dead—"come and see what you'd like to begin on, and what Janet and I had better do to-morrow. We got the bedrooms tidy, but your basin and jug are odd, I'm afraid. The cases of crockery haven't arrived yet

"I haven't got a basin and jug at all," she said defensively.

Every step of Herbert's through the disordered house was a step in a triumphal progress. Every echo from the tiles and naked boards derided and denied the memory of that small brick villa where he and Cicely had been born, where their mother's wedded life had begun and ended; that villa now empty and denuded, whose furniture looked so meagre in this spaciousness and height.

He carried a candlestick in either hand and raised them high above his head as he