On waking next morning she was aware that it was a most
beautiful winter's day and that there was something strange in the
air. There came to her then very slowly a sense of her father. She
saw him on the one side, persistently as she had found him in his
room, strange, shapeless, with a crumpled face and a dirty beard
that seemed to be more dead than the rest of him. On the other side
she saw him as she had found him in the first days of her
consciousness of the world.
He must have been "jolly" then, large and strong, laughing often,
tossing her, she remembered, to the ceiling, his beard jet-black and
his eyebrows bushy and overhanging. Once that vigour, afterwards
this horror. She shook away from her last vision of him but it
returned again and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like
an ill-omened messenger. And all the life between seemed to be
suddenly wiped away as a sponge wipes figures off a slate. After the
death of her mother she had made the best of her circumstances.
There had been many days when life had been unpleasant, and in the
last year, as his miserliness had grown upon him, his ill-temper at
any fancied extravagance had been almost that of an insane man, but
Maggie knew very little of the affairs of other men and it seemed to
her that every one had some disadvantage with which to grapple.
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