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In the night she woke after long, swooning sleep, clear-minded. She had been dreaming of her mother, who had, in the dream, come laughing to the breakfast-table and said, as she stood behind the coffee-urn: ‘I am going to become a Catholic today, and you must all come and see me take the veil at Brompton Oratory.’ It was a very characteristic announcement. They had always, all of them, been a family for sudden resolutions, and later in the dream she saw her mother, dressed like a bride, before an altar blazing with candles, and she herself and Alison, her younger sister, were bridesmaids and smiled at each other over the shower bouquets of the period. Then they were both crying and everything was dark and they were standing on either side of a black catafalque and their mother lay beneath; dead: ‘Of course we all knew that she killed herself,’ said Alison. Not until this dream had the truth been spoken—that her mother had indeed taken the overdose purposely; but she knew now that she had always known it. The dreadful grief drifted above her like a pall of smoke and when she woke she lay beneath it, thinking of all those