The living room could probably stay more or less unchanged. Her own chairs were infinitely preferable to the furniture she had seen in his sitting room, although he may well wish to bring the velvet picture of the mountain and one or two of his ornaments. These would complement her own possessions, which included the photograph of her father, her daddy, as she called him, Obed Ramotswe, in his favourite shiny suit, the photograph before which she stopped so often and thought of his life and all that it meant to her. She was sure that he would have approved of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He had warned her against Note Mokoti, although he had not tried to stop the marriage, as some parents might have done. She had been aware of his feelings but had been too young, and too infatuated with the plausible trumpet player, to take account of what her father thought. And, when the marriage had ended so disastrously, he had not spoken of his presentiment that this was exactly what would happen, but had been concerned only about her safety and her happiness-which is how he had always been. She was lucky to have had such a father, she thought; today there were so many people without a father, people who were being brought up by their mothers or their grandmothers and who in many cases did not even know who their father was. They seemed happy enough, it seemed, but there must always be a great gap in their lives. Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo, crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not.