on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was
saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you
silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"
and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.

Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.
"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.

"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"

But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had
been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's
mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
me?"

"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was
deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."

She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for
persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint,
barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife
for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been
alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a
charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should
understand her sacrifice and grieve.

"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so
that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.
"She wore high heels for her age--"

That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She
was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the
chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.
This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she
had gone back on it.

"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on
the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."

Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room
where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to
the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much
longer."

"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly
when she was unhappy."

His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not
know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal
her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear,
you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night....