ace
where she still lived, in spite of her body's absence.

The child beside her watched everything with wide, black
eyes. She had an odd little defiant look, her little red mouth
was pinched shut. She seemed to be jealously guarding something,
to be always on the alert for defence. She met Brangwen's near,
vacant, intimate gaze, and a palpitating hostility, almost like
a flame of pain, came into the wide, over-conscious dark
eyes.

The old clergyman droned on, Cossethay sat unmoved as usual.
And there was the foreign woman with a foreign air about her,
inviolate, and the strange child, also foreign, jealously
guarding something.

When the service was over, he walked in the way of another
existence out of the church. As he went down the church-path
with his sister, behind the woman and child, the little girl
suddenly broke from her mother's hand, and slipped back with
quick, almost invisible movement, and was picking at something
almost under Brangwen's feet. Her tiny fingers were fine and
quick, but they missed the red button.

"Have you found something?" said Brangwen to her.

And he also stooped for the button. But she had got it, and
she stood back with it pressed against her little coat, her
black eyes flaring at him, as if to forbid him to notice her.
Then, having silenced him, she turned with a swift
"Mother----," and was gone down the path.

The mother had stood watching impassive, looking not at the
child, but at Brangwen. He became aware of the woman looking at
him, standing there isolated yet for him dominant in her foreign
existence.

He did not know what to do, and turned to his sister. But the
wide grey eyes, almost vacant yet so moving, held him beyond
himself.

"Mother, I may have it, mayn't I?" came the child's proud,
silvery tones. "Mother"-she seemed always to be calling her
mother to remember her-"mother"-and she had nothing to continue
now her mother had replied "Yes, my child." But, with ready
invention, the child stumbled and ran on, "What are those
people's names?"

Brangwen heard the abstract:

"I don't know, dear."

He went on down the road as if he were not living inside
himself, but somewhere outside.

"Who was that person?" his sister Effie asked.

"I couldn't tell you," he answered unknowing.

"She's somebody very funny," said Effie, almost in
condemnation. "That child's like one bewitched."

"Bewitched--how bewitched?" he repeated.

"You can see for yourself. The