w in Richard's
infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like
for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the
kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not
to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."

At the door he turned.

"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.

She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure,
as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no
going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about
her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it
was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror
of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but
horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there
broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the
miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home
in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in
brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago
dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged
but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.

He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.

"Come," he said. "Come."

CHAPTER XI

Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...

Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no
tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the
seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the
further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it
confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds
pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they
could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to
take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden
staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they
could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the
grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and
she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his
shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be
there when he returned.

But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what
life was; wh