The two pieces of news arrived the same day.
The first, which was good, came with the morning post, which reached the Quadrant somewhere about nine o’clock. By that time, the family breakfast was over and all the family were scattered—Mr Bettany to his work in the estate office; the girls to make beds, do light dusting, and see to the meals for the rest of the day; the boys to such chores as bringing in coal, coke, and logs, cleaning shoes and knives, rigging up in the laundry the lines for the week’s washing, since it would be impossible to hang it outside today. Peggy, the eldest of the three girls, had gone to take up her mother’s breakfast and discuss the day’s jobs with her.
Mrs Bettany was slowly recovering from a very serious operation and, by doctor’s orders, did not come downstairs till the afternoon. She had been talking about putting a stop to this and coming down in time for lunch, at any rate; but her family was still too near to those awful days at the beginning of November when they had not known if she would live to come back to the Quadrant or not, and they had all stamped heavily on the idea.