CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"You should have seen how frightened she was!" said Henry to his son and daughter-in-law, "Scared out of her skin! Who knows what Miss Avery was doing in the house? Some old people are just strange like that."

"Did you think she was a ghost?" Dolly asked Margaret.

"No, not really," Margaret answered.

"The family forgives her strangeness because she used to be a friend of Ruth Wilcox's mother, who left this house for her daughter," explained Dolly. "In fact, I think it was Miss Avery who came very close to becoming a relative of Charles'. One of the Howard boys asked her to marry him, but she said 'no'. Then he went away and was killed. Then there were no more Howards after him. He was the last ... Howard's End. Ha! Ha! You see, I made a joke!"

"Come, Margaret. We'd better be going," said Henry. Then outside, as they approached the car, he whispered, "My God, I like Dolly, but I can only be around her for a short time before she starts to drive me crazy."

Margaret then understood why she and Henry could not live at Howards End now. They were much too close to Charles' home. Wilcoxes did not like to be near one another.

Later that night, as she sat in the dining room of Wickham Place, she thought about Howards End and what she and Henry had discussed while there. He had told her about the way he had protected the land as best he could and tried to make improvements on the home; how he had had a garage built for the motorcars, and added onto the house a larger kitchen for the servants. She loved him for having made such efforts to keep the place in good condition. She remembered looking out of the window at the large Elm tree in the front yard. It was clearly an old friend of the home and everyone who'd ever lived in it. And when they went downstairs to get back into the car and return to London, she noticed the pig's teeth near the bottom and pointed them out to Henry.

"How did you know about them?" he asked.

"Someone told me about them a couple of years ago in London," she answered. She, too, did not like to mention Mrs Wilcox's name.

(end of section)