She ran back to the temple. All she cared for really was pleasing him. "Richard, Richard! I've found her! She's down there on the marshes!"

He was out beside her in a second. "Where? How do you know?"

"I saw her lantern down on the marshes!"

When they got back to the hill's edge the light was still to be seen, bobbing along towards the elm brow. Richard clipped Ellen's waist to show her how well pleased he was with her. "Ah, that'll be Marion!" he said. "Nobody else would be on the marshes at this hour." Then a little wind of anger blew over his voice. "Has she been to his tomb? Can she have been to his tomb in the time? It's a steep climb for her. I wonder.... I wonder...."

The lantern bobbed out of sight behind the elm row. Feeling that they were again alone together, Ellen raised her lips to be kissed, but he had already turned away. "Let's go home now!" he said urgently. "I want to know where she's been."

The place seemed far more beautiful to her than it had done before. "Oh! Now you're sure she's quite safe, mayn't we stay here a little?" she begged.

"No, no. Some other night. I'll bring you to-morrow night. But not now, not now."

She followed laggingly, looking about her with infatuation. There was something religious about the scene. Rites of some true form of worship might fitly be celebrated here. All appeared more majestic and more sacred than in the strained, bickering moments before she showed him the lantern. Now she perceived that it was the silver circle of trees which was the real temple, and that the marble belvedere was but a human offering laid before the shrine. It was in there, along the ebony paths which ran among the glistening thickets, that one would find the presence of the divinity.

"Oh, Richard! It will never be so beautiful as this on any other night! Let us stay!"

"No. It will be just as good any moonlit night. I swear I'll bring you. But now I want to get back home."

He slipped her arm through his to make her come. She stumbled along, turning her face aside towards those mystic woods. At the end of those paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all sides by the forest; and there was something there.... Another temple? A statue? An event? She did not know. But if they found it, they would be happy for ever....

"Richard—"

"No."

He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the ploughed field. When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard gate, the bobbing lantern.

"She's going fairly quickly," he said softly, speculatively. "I wonder if she's been to his tomb? Do you think she's had time?"

"I don't know," Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when he must be aware she could not tell.

"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth at their feet. "We'll find out when we get home. Let's hurry back."

They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance. The humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She was the lucky woman, Marion.

"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in fine style."

"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to ask her where she has been."

"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull, drilling persistence.

When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such extraordinary things?"

Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she said pettishly.

He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"

The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight beams were still unclouded.

"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a revolver.

Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.

"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"

It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.

"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would auntie give us the clothes she was making?"

The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the kitchen brightness at them.

"Where is your mistress?" Richard asked them, cutting into the girl's sweet, silly speech. "Has she come back?"

The servants all started making twittering, consequential noises. "No, sir, she isn't." "We didn't know, any of us, you was out till the lady and gentleman come."

"What lady and gentleman?"

The two younger women shrunk back and left the cook to answer. "Mr. Roger Peacey, sir, and the lady." From the hindmost girl there came a giggle.

That was why they had not heard the knocking at the door. They had all been sitting laughing at his mother's other son and going over the family history. Ellen shrank back from the light. Marion's misfortunes made things very ill to deal with; they seemed to bring out the worst in everybody. And how the whole affair was hurting Richard! He turned on his heel and walked back to the trellis arch and went through it without waiting for her. By the time she had followed him round the corner of the house he was opening the French window into the dining-room. He found it quite easy to open; again she thought with rage and contempt of the way that Marion had fumbled with the handle. She had to run along the path lest in his forgetfulness he shut her out into the night.

She found him halted just within the room, pulling off his gauntlets and forcing a white smile towards Roger, who was standing swaying on the hearthrug, his cheeks dribbled with tears. Poppy stood beside him, staring sullenly at a blank wall, her mouth a little open with distaste for him.

"So you're giving us another visit," said Richard, in that hollow conscientious tone of kindness he had used to them in the afternoon.

Roger opened his mouth but could not speak; then flapped his hands to make it plain this was an occasion of importance, and cried bleatingly: "I've come to say that I forgive you all."

"Forgive us!" exclaimed Richard, swept away to the bleak extremity of rage. Then checked himself. "Oh, for not coming to your meeting. We hoped you would. Ellen was tired."

"I couldn't bear to think of you p'raps going to bed and feeling that I was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I've got Jesus I'll forgive anything that anybody does against me!" His voice wallowed rhapsodically. "So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of going straight back to the Colony."

Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to disassociate herself from him, from the situation.

"That was good of you," said Richard.

"And now"—the whistling tone came back in his speech—"I want to tell mother!"

"You can't do that. She isn't in."

"What, weren't you all out together? Didn't she come home with you?"

"No."

"Then, love o' goodness, where is she at this time of night?"

"Down on the marshes," said Richard casually. "She had a headache. She thought a walk in the night air would do her good." Slowly and deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the table.

"Oh," murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the wood. Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his brother's face. "Here! What's the matter with mother?"

"Nothing! Nothing!" exclaimed Richard in exasperation. "She's down on the marshes, having a walk."

"Oh, but you can't take me in that way!" the pallid creature cried, wringing his hands. "I can see you're frightened about mother!"

"I'm not," said Richard vehemently.

"You needn't try to fool me. I'm stupid about everything else, but not about mother! And I could always feel what was going on between you two. Many's the time I've had to leave the room because you two were loving each other so and I felt out of it. And now I know you're frightened about her! You are! You are!"

"I'm not!" shouted Richard.

Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight. "If you'd got Jesus," he said tartly, "you'd learn to be gentle. Like He was." He recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy's hand, which she tendered him deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for orders. "Now you'd better tell me what it is about mother that's making you frightened. She'd not be pleased, would she, if she came in and found you treating me like this, as if I hadn't a right to know anything about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?"

That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see. He looked down at his white knuckles and unclenched his hands. "It's really nothing," he told Roger in that false, kind voice. "I went upstairs after dinner to look over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here. When I came back Ellen told me she'd gone out for a walk on the marshes. It struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went out and had a look round, but couldn't see her anywhere. There's not the slightest occasion for worry."

Roger stared at him, sucking his front teeth. "But you're frightened!" he said explosively.

"I am not."

"You are. You think she's come to some harm down on the marshes." He slipped past him and flung open the French window, calling in a thin, whistling voice that could not have been heard fifty yards away: "Mummie! Mummie!"

A convulsion of rage ran through Richard. With one hand he jerked Roger back into the room by his coat-collar, with the other he slammed the French window. "Be quiet. I tell you she's all right. I know where she's gone."

"Where, then?"

"Never mind."

"Where? Where?" His hands fumbled for the doorhandle again.

"Oh, stop that!" Richard loosed hold of him with the expression of one who had grasped what he thought to be soft grass and finds his palms scored by a fibrous stalk. He said, and Ellen could see that he liked saying it as little as anything that he had ever said all his life long: "If you must know, I think she's gone up to my father's tomb."

Roger shook his head solemnly. "No. You're wrong. She hasn't gone there. And she's come to harm."

"Why in God's name do you say that?" burst out Richard.

"I know. I've known all the evening. That's really why I came back here after the service. That talk about forgiveness was just something I made up as an excuse. I knew quite well that something was wrong with mummie." His pale eyes sought first Richard and then Ellen. "Don't you believe a person might know if something happened to another person," he asked wistfully, "if they loved them enough?"

There was indeed such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really, Roger, she was quite bright before she went out. Ellen, tell Roger...."

But Roger stared out at the empty silver garden and whimpered inattentively: "I can't help it. I want to go down to the marshes and look for her."

"Very well," agreed Richard, blinking. The sight of the love in those weak eyes made his voice authentically kind. "We'll go down. She ought to be easy to find as she's carrying a lantern. You're quite sure she has got a lantern with her, Ellen?"

"Oh yes," said Ellen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back and looked through the window."

"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"

"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went away."

"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before she went out."

She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and talked to her about saucepans."

"What saucepans?"

"Aluminium saucepans."

"But what about them?"

She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."

For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She really was all right, Ellen?"

"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."

Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face, which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."

Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here, Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."

They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.

Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."

"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.

"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying: "Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly: "That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in the sky. Is that Chatham?"

With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it was."

"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.

Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.

She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.

There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o' you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said: "Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"

That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her hands.

"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"

"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."

Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story, "But when did you find the lantern?"

"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."

They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any moment it might move or speak.

"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened yet!"

He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."

"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"

He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead. There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's dead."

It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat; and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food." He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.

"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."

He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a thing on my stomach."

"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."

That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.

Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"

"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."

"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."

"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to worry."

"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone. "It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled: "Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to the sallowness of the morning.

When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns," and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.

Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen. "She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.

"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"

But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over me?"

"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."

She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint, barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should understand her sacrifice and grieve.

"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence. "She wore high heels for her age—"

That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton. This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she had gone back on it.

"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."

Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much longer."

"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly when she was unhappy."

His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear, you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."

"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."

Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds. Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always, till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened women....

"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which chair?"

"Yon, at your hand."

He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him stroking the soft velvet, laying his cheek against it.

"And the desk? You say she sat there while she talked to cook?"

"Yes."

She hated the way he sat down in front of it; in a heap, like a tired navvy. By her death Marion deprived her of her beautiful lightfooted lover. But she must wait. He would come back. She became aware that Roger was speaking to her. It appeared that he had sobbed in his cup and had sent jets of tea flying over the tablecloth, and he was now apologising.

"Never heed," she told him comfortingly; "we'll have a clean one for lunch." "I didn't mean to," he quavered piteously, but she checked him. Richard had turned over his shoulder a white face.

"She sat here?..."

"Yes. While the cook stood talking to her, she sat there."

"She ... You didn't notice ... when she was sitting there ... if she was scribbling on the blotter?"

"Yes, she did. I noticed that."

"Ah ... ah...."

* * * * *

She was beside him in the time of a breath. But he had not fainted, though his head had crashed down on the wood, for his fingers, buried in his hair, still laced and interlaced. She did not dare touch him; but she grovelled for the blotter, which at the moment of his groan had fallen to the floor, and stood staring at it. For a second her attention was dispersed by a shudder of disgust, for she felt Roger's noisy mouth-breathing at her ears. Then the proof leapt to her eyes. There was a rim of plain paper round the calendar on the inside of the cover, and this was covered with words and phrases written in the exquisite small script of Marion. "This is the end. Death. Death. Death. This is the end. I must die. Give him to Ellen. I must die."

Roger tumbled back towards Poppy. "The awful sin of self-destruction!" he wailed.

This proof struck through her with an awful, unifying grief. She had had evidence of Marion's intention which had convinced her mind, but it was all derived from ugliness: from the awkwardness of the woman's talk, the plainness of the face against the glass, the intrusive loitering of a squat figure in the garden. The soul had hearkened to these ugly messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living might grieve for any that is dead, now knew the sorrow appropriate to the destruction of Marion's wide, productive body. For what her spirit learned and admitted it had always known of that burning thing which had been Marion she looked round the room in reverence, since she had lived there. The light on the handle of the French window caught her eye, and she wept. She had been annoyed with Marion because she could not turn it. But who would not find it difficult to open a door if it was death on which it opened?

"Richard, I love your mother!" she sobbed. "I love your mother so!"

He muttered something. In case he was speaking to her she bent down and listened. But he was repeating over and over again in accents of irony: "Give him up to Ellen. Give him up to Ellen. Oh, mother, mother...."

By the passion for Marion that was wringing her she could measure the flame that must be devouring him. There was a strong impulse in her to feel nothing but pity for him; to apprehend with resignation that there might be a period ahead during which he might feel hatred for her, loathing her for being alive when his mother, who deserved so well, was dead. She stepped backward from the desk so that he need not be vexed by any sense of her. Yet she had a feeling as she moved that she was taking a step infinitely rash, infinitely dangerous....

She became aware that behind her Roger was shaking words out of his weeping body. "You ought to be on your knees, you two! You've killed my mummie with your wickedness!"

"What's that?" she murmured, turning on him. "What's that?" She was not quite attentive. A picture was forming in her consciousness which, when it was clear, would tell her why it was perilous to leave Richard to his grief....

"Aw, shut up!" hissed Poppy, and tugged at his arm.

But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."

Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always suspected to be danger....

"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you, and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."

It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to his passion.

"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"

Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother, shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly, but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than themselves to dwell in their men's attention.

"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark what your brother's saying of us!"

He stirred. He sat up.

"He says we're bad."

He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face, though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.

"It's no use you looking at me like that," said Roger tearfully but resolutely. "I'm as good as you. In fact, I'm better now that I've got Jesus. And I tell you straight, you've killed my mummie with your beastly lust. Mind you," he cried, in a tone of whistling exaltation inappropriate to his words, "I'm not pretending I'm without sin myself. I did evil once with a woman at Blackburn, but I saw the filthiness of my ways. Old man, I do understand your temptations!"

What was Richard's hand searching for on the breakfast table? She bent forward to see, so that she might give it to him.

Richard had found what he wanted. His fingers tightened on the handle of the breadknife.

"Let's put an end to this," he said.

He drove the knife into Roger's heart.

"Mummie!" breathed Roger. Meekly, but with no sign that he had any other quarrel with the proceedings save that they were peremptory, he sank down on the chair beside him and fell forward, his head lying untidily among the tea-cups. This, no doubt, was the disorder which Marion had always foreseen; to prevent which she had practised her insane tidiness.

He held the attention much less than one had thought a dead man could.

"God," said Poppy, "this is a copper's business. I'm off before they come. They think I know something about a thing that happened down in Strood last Easter, though God help me I don't. They kind of mixed me up with someone else. Let me go."

"Right," said Richard, and put his hand into his pocket and brought out a fistful of coins. "Take this. Good luck."

She snatched it, and with no further look at any of the company, ran out by the French window.

They stood looking down on Roger. Death revealed no significance in him. The smallness of his head, the indefinite colour of his hair, palliated what had occurred and made them feel incredulous of their knowledge that presently much importance would be attached to it.

Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Well, it's all cleared up now," he murmured. "It is as if she had never seen Peacey...."

Ellen broke into sobs. "'Tis I who made you do it. I thought of my poor mother and how she'd suffered through not making my father think of her first and last—and you were sitting there thinking of nothing but Marion—and I knew if you heard what Roger was saying about us you'd think of me, so I made you listen. If I hadn't given you yon dunts on your shoulders you never would have heard him and never would have killed him. Oh, my love, what I have done to you, and me that would have died rather than hurt you! But I saw my mother plain—"

"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"

"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."

"But there's nothing left."

"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."

"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's something still."

He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.

"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.

There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."

At the door he turned.

"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.

She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure, as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.

He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.

"Come," he said. "Come."



CHAPTER XI

Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...

Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be there when he returned.

But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies: the insane sexual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive steadfastness of women. Roger had died, Richard was about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female faults—Harry and Marion ... Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and father.... And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life's disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous. Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love; and how like a doom that love had lain on him.... Since life was like this, she would not do what Richard asked. She tried to rise that she might flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.

But she could not move. Although her mind was still arguing the matter, all the rest of her being had consented. She was going to do this thing. In panic she looked along the wall at Richard, wishing he would come back to her. But he was going on talking to the fishermen, though he held their waders in his hand. She quite understood why he was doing that, and watched him through tears. This was the last time he would be able to exercise that charm of which he was a little vain, since on all his few future days his intercourse with his fellows would be strictly specialised; so he was taking the opportunity. In watching him and the reflection of his magnificence in the fishermen's smiling subjugation, she was shot through by a pang of pride and exultation. Though the night should engulf Richard and Marion, the triumph was not with the night. In throwing in her lot with them and with the human race which is perpetually defeated, she was nevertheless choosing the side of victory....

She leaned back against the slope and waited. This was a good place to wait. The call of the redshanks, the cloud shadows that moved over the marshes like the footprints of invisible presences, made her feel calm.

Nevertheless her heart could not help but beat quick with fear. She wished that he would come and comfort her. But though he had left the fishermen he was not coming straight to her. He had climbed the sea-wall and was looking out to the east, to the open sea, over the country of the mud. He was thinking of Marion, and wondering where the tide had carried her. The inexorable womb was continuing to claim its own. She wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant demand.

She sat and looked at the island, and wondered whether it was a son or daughter that waited for her there.

THE END