Mrs. Venn did the washing up herself, as she had done after every occasion in that house for forty-one years, and nobody dared to offer.

It was past ten. The last cart had gone down the hill at nine, with Old Lantern asleep in the back and Hartigan's carnation drooping from the lamp of the car in front, and the great hall stood dark and echoing with white lilac in the brazier and a smell of beeswax and champagne. The cook had gone to bed with his apron still on. The girls had been sent up. In the long white kitchen, under the one lamp she had left lit, a stout old woman in her best black stood at the sink with her sleeves pushed above the elbow and her lace cap crooked, and rinsed a glass.

She held it to the light. It was an ordinary tumbler, thick and a little scratched, and it had held nothing but lemonade, tested. She put it on the rack. She took up another.

They had been very good about the day. She had said so to no one, and would say so to no one, but she turned it over now in the quiet like a stone in a pocket. They had been good about the tea, and the cake, and the thing with the barometer, and the boy who had tried to fall in the water. They had been good about herself. A young man she had carried on her hip had looked across a table at her, at five o'clock, with his shirt open at the neck and his face still wet, and said only, in a low voice, Venn. And she had said, I have said nothing, sir. And he had laughed, and she had turned and gone to see about the cold meat before anything could be done to her face.

She dried her hands. She stood for a moment in the lamplight, alone, and looked at the shelf by the window.

There was a copper pan on it, and a clock, and a small clay pot with a few dark leaves and a single drooping flower the color of a bruise. It had been there since December. She went across the red tiles and touched it with one finger, as one touches the cheek of a sleeping child. It was a violet. Somebody had put it there on a Sunday, when the house had laughed aloud for the first time in twenty-one years, and had watered it every morning since, and had told no one the reason.

She had come to the house in the autumn of her twenty-fifth year, from a village in the north where there was nothing left to stay for, with a cardboard case and a letter from a parson. The kitchen had been very large and very cold. A young woman had come down in the first week, in a yellow dress, with her hair pinned any way, and sat on the edge of the table swinging one foot and asked Mrs. Venn her Christian name. Nobody had asked it in two years. She had been so startled that she told her.

The young woman had laughed. She had gone out to the glasshouse at the end of the garden and come back with an armful of earth and a little crooked pot, and set it in Mrs. Venn's hands. Violets, she said. They sulk in a house, but they forgive you if you talk to them. You will need something to talk to, in this place. It is full of men.

She had talked to them for twenty-one years.

They had gone with the mistress. That was the dreadful thing. She had come in from the market on a gray March morning and found the glasshouse door open and every pot on the bench knocked to the floor, and she had stood in the wet and the broken clay and understood that the master had been in. He never spoke of it. He had never once, in all the years after, so much as looked toward the end of the garden. She had gathered up what she could in her apron, the last four crowns, and taken them up to her own room under the roof, and kept them on the sill in the cold light, and talked to them, and said nothing to anyone.

One had lived.

It had lived through twenty-one winters in a cracked jug on a sill that no one visited. It had flowered every February, a single sullen purple bloom. She had never moved it. She had been afraid that a change of air would kill it, and afraid, if she was honest, that bringing it down into the kitchen where someone might see would be to admit that she remembered. And then in December, on a gray Sunday, in the library, she had heard a man laugh.

She had been in the passage with a tray. She had stopped as though struck. It was a young man's laugh, startled and cracked and without guard, and under it a woman's, quick and warm, and the sound of them together came through the oak door and into the stone passage and went through her from her cap to her shoes. She had stood there with the tray shaking. And she had put it down on the flags, and gone up three flights of stairs without a word, and come down again with a cracked jug under her arm.

She had put it on the shelf by the window. She had watered it that morning, and every morning after, and it had not died.

She took a small pair of shears from the dresser, and a clean twist of damp cloth, and a trowel the length of her hand. She went out by the scullery door.

The night was mild. The wind had dropped. A big white moon stood over the cypresses, and the lawn lay silver and empty, still strewn with a few abandoned paper napkins and one forgotten shoe. She walked down it slowly, with one hand at her back, in the soft dark, to the east border where the old brick wall kept off the wind. A thin straight whip of a tree stood there in the moonlight, no higher than her waist, with six leaves on it and a bare place where a single blossom had been cut that morning for a bride's hair.

She knelt.

It took some effort. Her knees were not what they had been. She put the trowel into the soft ground a hand's breadth from the third root, and she did not have to wonder what lay under it. She had watched a young man bury it in the first week of March, from the kitchen window, kneeling in the cold with a small flat tin in his hands, and she had said nothing for seven days. She had been afraid that if she spoke she would say a thing that could not be taken back.

She cut a sprig from the violet, a short length with two leaves and a bud, and set it in the earth beside the root. She firmed it with her thumb. She sat back on her heels, with her breath going a little hard, and looked at it.

"She would have liked that," said a voice.

It was behind her, low, from the dark of the wall. She did not turn. She had known the sound of that step on a gravel path since it was the size of her forearm. She heard it come on, unhurried, across the grass, and stop, and then a man in shirtsleeves knelt down on the other side of the little tree with his knees in the dirt and his white cuffs turned back.

He did not say anything more. He took the trowel from her hand, and drew it round the stem of the violet, and gently heaped the soil. He did it carefully, with his head bent, as he had once mended the planks of a small boat. In the moonlight she saw that his face was wet, and that he did not mind her seeing.

"I did not know that you kept them," said Matteo.

"No, sir."

"All this time."

"I said that I would see to the house," said Mrs. Venn. She looked at the dark leaves. "She asked me, you know. At the end. She was very weak, and she said, Venn, you will stay until it is lived in again. And I said that I would." Her broad hands lay folded in her lap. "I did not say that I was counting."

"Forty-one years."

"Forty-one in October, sir." A dry breath that was nearly a laugh. "It is a good deal of tea."

He put down the trowel. He sat back on his heels in the damp grass, with his hands on his knees, and looked at her across the little tree, and she saw him open his mouth and close it, and she knew perfectly well what he was going to say. She lifted her chin.

"I should be obliged," said Mrs. Venn, "if you did not."

"I have said nothing."

"No, sir." She almost smiled. "You never do."

He laughed. It broke out of him softly, and he put the back of his wrist against his eyes, and for a moment they were two people kneeling on either side of a stick in a flower bed, as they might have been at any hour of the last twenty years, and neither of them spoke.

It was the lamp that made them look up.

A light had come on at the end of the house, on the first floor, behind a tall window in the east wing. A pale gold square. The balcony doors opened, and a slight figure came out and stood against the rail in a white shirt that was plainly not her own, with her hair down and her bare feet on the stone. She was looking out over the dark garden. She did not seem to see them. She put her hands on the rail, and leaned there, and tipped her face up to the moon.

Matteo had stopped breathing.

Mrs. Venn watched him. She did it as she had watched him all his life, sidelong, with the whole of her attention and none of her face. She saw him rise to his feet, slowly, and stand in the grass with his hands at his sides, and look up at that bright small window. And then, across the whole width of the garden, in the white light, he lifted one hand a little way from his side, palm upward. It was the smallest movement in the world. It asked a question that no one could have heard.

On the balcony, the figure straightened. She was a long moment still. Then she nodded.

It was all that happened. A girl on a balcony, and a man in a garden, and a nod. But Mrs. Venn, kneeling in the dirt with her good black skirt soaked through, felt something give way in her chest like a knot in a thread, and let go.

"Go in, sir," she said, to the pear tree. "You will catch cold."

He was gone before she had finished. She heard his feet on the gravel, and the scullery door, and a long way off the thump of someone taking the back stair two at a time, as a boy does. She sat on in the moon with her hands in her lap and the small violet at her knee, and the night went on being mild.

She got up in the end. It took two goes. She brushed the earth from her skirt, and took up the shears and the trowel and the twist of wet cloth, and went back up the lawn. In the kitchen she banked the stove, and wiped her hands, and put out the lamp. She stood a moment in the dark. Then she lit a candle and went across to the table, and took the great china bowl from the shelf where she had put it in October and set it back in the middle, among the plates, where it belonged.

It held six pears. They were small and green-gold, and ripe.

She turned over the card that lay beneath them, the one that said, in her own square hand, For emergencies, and looked at it for a long time. Then she laid it face down on the pine, and put a pear on top, to hold it.

There would not be any for a while. But it was always as well to be prepared.

She carried the candle up to bed. Behind her, on the shelf by the window, in the dark, a clay pot with a few dark leaves stood quietly in the moonlight, and was watered, and was not alone.