le of sixteen, plagued by family shortcomings. She was
very sensitive to her father. She knew if he had been drinking,
were he ever so little affected, and she could not bear it. He
flushed when he drank, the veins stood out on his temples, there
was a twinkling, cavalier boisterousness in his eye, his manner
was jovially overbearing and mocking. And it angered her. When
she heard his loud, roaring, boisterous mockery, an anger of
resentment filled her. She was quick to forestall him, the
moment he came in.

"You look a sight, you do, red in the face," she cried.

"I might look worse if I was green," he answered.

"Boozing in Ilkeston."

"And what's wrong wi' Il'son?"

She flounced away. He watched her with amused, twinkling
eyes, yet in spite of himself said that she flouted him.

They were a curious family, a law to themselves, separate
from the world, isolated, a small republic set in invisible
bounds. The mother was quite indifferent to Ilkeston and
Cossethay, to any claims made on her from outside, she was very
shy of any outsider, exceedingly courteous, winning even. But
the moment the visitor had gone, she laughed and dismissed him,
he did not exist. It had been all a game to her. She was still a
foreigner, unsure of her ground. But alone with her own children
and husband at the Marsh, she was mistress of a little native
land that lacked nothing.

She had some beliefs somewhere, never defined. She had been
brought up a Roman Catholic. She had gone to the Church of
England for protection. The outward form was a matter of
indifference to her. Yet she had some fundamental religion. It
was as if she worshipped God as a mystery, never seeking in the
least to define what He was.

And inside her, the subtle sense of the Great Absolute
wherein she had her being was very strong. The English dogma
never reached her: the language was too foreign. Through it all
she felt the great Separator who held life in His hands,
gleaming, imminent, terrible, the Great Mystery, immediate
beyond all telling.

She shone and gleamed to the Mystery, Whom she knew through
all her senses, she glanced with strange, mystic superstitions
that never found expression in the English language, never
mounted to thought in English. But so she lived, within a
potent, sensuous belief that included her family and contained
her destiny.

To this she had reduced her husband. He existed with her
entirely indifferent to the general values of