oad to fight, and had come back having lost her battle.
And already she was being scourged for her failure.

When she had been striving alone these two had evidently forgotten her
existence. Directly she had passed for a short time out of their lives
they had come together. Youth had instinctively sought out youth, and
she, the old woman, had been as one dead to them. If she had stayed away
for years, if she had never come back, it would not have mattered to
them.

Beryl's lack of all affection for her did not seriously trouble her. She
knew the dryness of vanity; she knew that it was practically impossible
for a girl so vain as Beryl to care deeply, or at all unselfishly, for
another woman. But Craven's conduct was not what she had looked for.
It seemed to stamp him as typical, and she had supposed him to be
exceptional. When Beryl had told her about Camber--so little and yet so
much--she had been struck to the heart; and yet she had seen a vision of
servants, the footman out in the dark with the under housemaid.

Seymour Portman's observant old eyes, the terrible eyes of affection,
took in the change in her, not quite as a woman's eyes would have done,
but in their own adequate way. His Adela looked different. Something had
happened to her. The envelope had been touched up in some, to him, quite
mysterious manner. And he did not like it. It even gave him a mild
sort of shock. The touch of artificiality was cold on this amazingly
straightforward old man. He loved his Adela with all the wrinkles, with
the sagging skin, and the lined throat, and the curiously experienced
weariness about the temples. She lived for him in the brilliant eyes,
and was loved by him in them. And why should she suddenly try to change
her appearance? It had certainly not been done for him--this Something.
She was looking handsomer than usual, and yet he seemed to be aware that
beneath the improved surface there was a tragic haggardness which had
come into existence while she had been away.

He did not reproach her for the mystery of her absence, or for her
silence; he did not ask her questions about where she had been, what
she had done; he just sat with her and loved her. And his love made her
horribly uneasy that day. She could not be still under it. She felt as
if the soul of her kept shifting about, as a child shifts about under
the watchful eyes of an elder. She felt the physical tingle of guilt.
And she was thankful when at last Seymour