; before this she lay stretched out on a
sofa of faded green--her black dress, her motionless white hands, her
pale face, her moving eyes.

She had beside her to-day a little plate of dry biscuits, and, now and
again, her hand would move across her black dress and break one of these
with a sharp sound, and then her hand would fall back again.

"I am very glad to see you. Draw your chair to the fire. It is a chill
day, but fine, I believe."

She regarded him gravely.

"It is not much of life that I can watch from this room, Mr. Dune. It is
good of you to come and see me . . . there must be many other things for
you to do."

He came at once to the point.

"I want your permission to ask your daughter to marry me, Mrs. Craven."

There was a long silence between them. He seemed, in his inner
consciousness, to be carrying on a dialogue.

"You see," he said to the Shadow, "I have forestalled you. I shall ask
Margaret Craven this evening to marry me. You cannot prevent that . . .
you _cannot_."

And a voice answered: "All things betray Thee Who betrayest Me."

"You have known us a very short time, Mr. Dune." Mrs. Craven's voice
came to him from a great distance.

He felt as though he were speaking to two persons. "Time has nothing to
do with falling in love, Mrs. Craven."

He saw to his intense amazement that she was greatly moved. She, who
had always seemed to him a mask, now was suddenly revealed as suffering,
tortured, intensely human. Her thin white hands were pressed together.

"I am a lonely, unhappy woman, Mr. Dune. Margaret is now all that is
left to me. Everything has been taken from me. Rupert--" Her voice
was lost; very slowly tears rolled down her cheeks. She began again
desperately. "Margaret is all that I have got. If I were left alone it
would be too much for me. I could not endure the silence."

It was the more moving in that it followed such stern reserve. His own
isolation, the curious sense that he had that they were, both of them,
needing protection against the same power (it seemed to him that if he
raised his eyes he would see, on the opposite wall, the shadow of
that third Presence); this filled him with the tenderest pity, so that
suddenly he bent down and kissed her hand.

She caught his with a fierce convulsive movement, and so they sat in
silence whilst he felt the pulse of her hand beat through his body, and
once a tear rolled from her cheek on to his wrist.

"You understand . . .