r father's wishes, and at my time
of life I can't alter. Your father was a very wise man. We shall be as well
off as we always were. Better, because I can save, and I shall save. We
have no complaint to make; I should have no excuse for disobeying your
father. Everything is mine to do as I wish with it, and I shall give the
shares to the Society. What the shares are worth can't affect my duty.
Besides, perhaps they aren't worth anything. I always understood that
things like that were always jumping up and down, and generally worthless
in the end.... That's all I wanted to tell you."

Why did Audrey seize the candle and walk straight out of the bedroom,
leaving darkness behind her? Was it because the acuteness of her feelings
drove her out, or was it because she knew instinctively that her mother's
decision would prove to be immovable? Perhaps both.

She dropped back into her own bed with a soundless sigh of exhaustion. She
did not blow out the candle, but lay staring at it. Her dream was
annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and
about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously
obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite her tragic disillusion, was less
desolated than made solemn. In the most disturbing way she knew herself to
be the daughter of her father and her mother; and she comprehended that her
destiny could not be broken off suddenly from theirs. She was touched
because her mother deemed her father a very wise man, whereas she, Audrey,
knew that he was nothing of the sort. She felt sorry for both of them. She
pitied her father, and she was a mother to her mother. Their relations
together, and the mystic posthumous spell of her father over her mother,
impressed her profoundly.... And she was proud of herself for having
demonstrated her courage by preventing the solicitor from running away, and
extraordinarily ashamed of her sentimental and brazen behaviour to the
solicitor afterwards. These various thoughts mitigated her despair as she
gazed at the sinking candle. Nevertheless her dream was annihilated.

CHAPTER VI

THE YOUNG WIDOW

It was early October. Audrey stood at the garden door of Flank Hall.

The estuary, in all the colours of unsettled, mild, bright weather, lay at
her feet beneath a high arch of changing blue and white. The capricious
wind moved in her hair, moved in the rich grasses of the sea-wall, bent at
a curtseying angle the red-s