The guns clank on the stone, one after the other, echoing against the walls outside the chapel, as the men come in for Mass before the shoot. Mamie, whose age is eight years and two months, kneels in the second row from the back, on the right-hand side, near the Virgin, where a warm candle is lit. There is no other warmth. Alice Long is kneeling on a front hassock. Her two brothers from London have come in—tall men in knickerbockers and green wool stockings that stride past Mamie’s eyes as she kneels in her place.

Other big men have put their guns against the wall outside the chapel door. The Catholics from the cottages have come in. Everyone except the strangers is praying for more snow and a road blockage to the town, so that poor Alice Long can decently serve roe deer, roe deer, roe deer for all the meals that the London people are going to eat. The woods are cracking alive with roe deer, but meat from the town has got to be paid for with money.

Alice Long is round-shouldered and worried; she is the only daughter of old Sir Martin, and is always addressed, to her face, as Miss Long. Her money is her own, but it goes into the keeping of the House.

Alice Long’s two brothers’ wives have come into the chapel now. They are the last, because they have to look after their own babies when they get up. Before Mamie’s birth, all the babies in the House had nurses. The two wives were differently made from the start, before they became Alice Long’s sisters-in-law, and still look so, although their tweed coats were made more alike. One is called Lady Caroline and the other, Mrs. Martin Long, will be Lady Long when old Sir Martin dies and Martin Long comes into the title.

Mamie is watching Lady Caroline through her fingers. Lady Caroline is big and broad, with bobbed black hair under her black lace veil; she doesn’t like Alice Long’s dogs, and dogs are the only things Alice Long has for herself. Alice Long was made to be kept down by upkeep.