murmured.

The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied,
one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing
at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which
sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale
clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a
lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will
not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon,
so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her
white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had
stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across
the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she
could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like
doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his
towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely,
"No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.
Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves
that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by
the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but
her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to
desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she
exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"

Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would
not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my
life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you
willed with. Let me have mine."

But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy
people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay
hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she
said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced
herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her
that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering
vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to
be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.
I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I
die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of
me--quite unreasonably fond. And even if I li