What They Choose

The blue bedroom had a fire in it that had been lit by a maid with a match at half past four in the afternoon on nobody’s timetable, and by eleven at night the room was the temperature a room ought to be, which was the first time Nell had been warm above stairs at Wexhall in a fortnight.

There was a candlestick on the mantelpiece. She stood and looked at it for a while, because it was plainly the candlestick, the one that had come off this mantel on the eleventh of September while a woman two rooms away wrote a letter accepting a visit on somebody else’s behalf, and somebody in the last twenty-four hours had put it back.

She took the resonance glass out of her coat pocket, pushed the stopper home, and set it on the mantel beside the candlestick with the needle dead in the…