She would close doors, turn out lights, put things back where she found them, mend her clothes, keep accounts.Indeed a new life was beginning for her.She felt, with a sudden return to the days before her walk on the moor, that if only her aunts would love her she would improve much more rapidly.And then with her new independence she assured herself that if they did not love her she most certainly would not love them...
That night she sat opposite her aunt beside the fire.The house lay dead and empty behind them.Aunt Anne was so neat in her thin black silk, her black shining hair, her pale pointed face, a little round white locket rising and falling ever so slowly with the lift of her breast.There were white frills to her sleeves, and she read a slim book bound in purple leather.Her body never moved; only once and again her thin, delicate hand ever so gently lifted, turned a page, then settled down on to her lap once more.She never raised her eyes.
The fire was heavy and sullen; the wind howled; that old familiar beating of the twigs upon the pane seemed to reiterate to Maggie that this was her last evening.She pretended to read.She had found a heavy gilt volume of Paradise Lost with Dore's pictures.She read these words:
Beyond this flood a frozen Continent Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms Of whirlwind and dire hail; which on firm land Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice, A gulf profound as that Serbonian bay Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, Where armies whole have sunk;the parching Air Burns froze, and cold performs the effect of Fire.