llen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back
and looked through the window."

"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"

"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his
mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the
door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the
glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went
away."

"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in
amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a
reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before
she went out."

She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her
that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all
in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about
us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and
talked to her about saucepans."

"What saucepans?"

"Aluminium saucepans."

"But what about them?"

She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple
in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the
narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on
hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get
them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."

For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her
because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She
really was all right, Ellen?"

"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."

Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure
of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring
things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was
not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it
had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned
towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face,
which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will
most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."

Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He
turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here,
Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so
preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for
Poppy.