l that sort of thing...."

She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be
suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some
symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he
had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating
past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had
made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the
silence settle.

After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"

She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as
it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out,"
she said timorously.

"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"

"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and
that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."

"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to
the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the
east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird
of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the
end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he
exclaimed.

"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen
felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the
woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There
was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and
yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.

"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He
turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been
incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me
she was doing this?"

Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it?
You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each
other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like
children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces.
She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this
trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all
day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him,
slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing
that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her
head after the day she'