she
stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the
fading, beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate was the stile that
led uphill, under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut
pastures. The sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank
quickly off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew
dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare the
diminished commotion of the fair.

Sometimes, down the trough of darkness formed by the path under the
hedges, men came lurching home. One young man lapsed into a run down
the steep bit that ended the hill, and went with a crash into the stile.
Mrs. Morel shuddered. He picked himself up, swearing viciously, rather
pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.

She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She was
beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed so far
away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking
heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the
breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.

"What have I to do with it?" she said to herself. "What have I to do
with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn't seem as if
I were taken into account."

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes
one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were
slurred over.

"I wait," Mrs. Morel said to herself--"I wait, and what I wait for can
never come."

Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked
out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After which
she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle flashed
regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to relieve
herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most of what
she had, for the children's sakes.

At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and
very shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was
pleased with himself.

"Oh! Oh! waitin' for me, lass? I've bin 'elpin' Anthony, an' what's
think he's gen me? Nowt b'r a lousy hae'f-crown, an' that's ivry
penny--"

"He thinks you've made the rest up in beer," she said shortly.

"An' I 'aven't--that I 'aven't. You b'lieve me, I've 'ad very little
this day, I have an' all." His voice went tender. "Here, an' I browt
thee a bit o'