Just as on the night when her uncle had come into her room she had fancied that some one spoke to her, so now she seemed to hear: "Ah, that's a nasty knock for you--a very nasty knock." Her father had left all his money, with the exception of 300, Pounds Sterling to Ellen the cook; Maggie did not, for a moment, speculate as to the probable total amount.

Three hundred pounds seemed to her a very large sum--it would at any rate give her something to begin life upon--but the thing that seized and held her was the secret friendship that must have existed between her father and Ellen--secret friendship was the first form that the relationship assumed for her.

She saw Ellen, red of face with little eyes and a flat nose upon which flies used to settle, a fat, short neck, the wheezings and the pantings, the stumping walk, the great broad back.

And she saw her father--first as the tall, dirty man whom she used to know, with the shiny black trousers, the untidy beard, the frowning eyes, the nails bitten to the quick, the ragged shirt-cuffs--then as that veiled shape below the clothes, the lift of the sheet above the toes, the loins, the stomach, the beard neatly brushed, the closed yellow eyelids, the yellow forehead, the rats with their gleaming eyes.

In a kind of terror as though she were being led against her will into some disgusting chamber where the skulls were stale and the sights indecent, she saw the friendship of those two--Ellen the cook and her father.
Young, inexperienced though she was, she was old already in a certain crude knowledge of facts.