She was before the house now, beating a Turkey carpet that hung from the washing line. I had never seen that carpet before, but the house had come furnished, and the wife was turning new things up every day.

'I still can't believe it's our house,' said Sylvia as we came up.

'Well, you can thank Mr Robert Henderson for that,' I said.

'He must really like us,' said Sylvia.

'He really likes mother,' said Harry, and I eyed him as we stopped to watch the beating of the rug.

It was true enough.

I watched the wife beating away. With each stroke, a wisp of her brown hair flew forwards, and she pushed it back behind her left ear. But her left ear was too small to keep it in place. You'd think she'd have worked that out after thirty years. As she went at it, the colour rose in her face – not to redness, but a dark brown. I had often wondered whether there might have been a touch of the tar brush in the wife's family, to account for the blackness of her eyes, and the brownness that went all the way down. I thought of Harry's paper, The Captain, which he had on subscription every week, and how one of the stories was 'Tales of the Far West'. There were Sioux Indians in these tales and at odd times a Sioux squaw would appear, supposedly a different one every time. But all of them looked like Lydia.

'Feel free to just stand there gawping,' she said. 'Harry, you'll take the water up for your sister's wash.'

Harry went off to the copper in the scullery. He was good about helping around the house. His main job was to look out for his sister. Their bedrooms were both at the end of a long corridor, over the top of the in-built barn, and this made Sylvia nervous, even though it was these two rooms that had decided us – or decided the wife – to rent the house from Henderson at the knockdown rate of seven shillings a week. It was the view over the fields that had done it. There was a gas mantle in the corridor between the two rooms, and Sylvia believed that it was kept on all night. But this was because she had never yet been awake beyond eight o'clock. In fact, Harry was under orders to come out of his room and switch it off at nine, after his hour of reading, which was often more than an hour.