"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father."

His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father.

"Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."

It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.

It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.

She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a hammer on her own delicate reluctances.

"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before he died."

He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.

"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent because of the beating of her heart.

Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."

"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house, which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them, so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.

Something about his silence a.s.sured her that she had succeeded. She went on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in, if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come and see you.'"

Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left you to for years."

"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world, will it be as jolly as this?'"

"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"

"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."

"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a woman, what would you have said?"

"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for one's husband. One expects much more."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a son's a happier thing than a daughter--there's something a little sad about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do with this business of having children--and men like that do so love happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four, and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you would."

"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"

"Yes. It was Punch."

She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.

She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."

"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque Hall."

The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had, so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.

And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead."

For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each other--and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making something--something--" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot, and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is so!" she cried defiantly.

The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.

He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to bed," he said.

"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.

Uneasily he stood and watched her.

"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.

"The Registrar?"

"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one does."

"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"

"Yes," he said. "Good-night."

When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she pa.s.sed his door. She flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything.

She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the pa.s.sage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve, and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered her.

Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits that were all that was to be seen of the girl.

"Ellen," she said.

The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.

"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."

Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.

"I know. We've got the vote."

"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."

The girl sat up. "When did he come?"

"Last night."

"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"

"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."

Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets lose their value when they are disclosed...."

She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.

Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity, for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls, in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.