ld
people. They looked terrible: Grandmother sitting among her spreading
skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands
clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was
not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering
her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and
rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and
fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were
an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign.
Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget
that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she
had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons,
the velvet homes of elfs--reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in
sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that
colours have commonly only in twilight.

But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power
over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry
her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared,
and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his
own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow,
"Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And
Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core
of her soul a _dame de compagnie_; and Grandmother had said, with that
use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of
truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come
back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."

That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true
that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his
career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous
compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to
have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still
that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the
linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her
agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and
shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that
such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been
sacred to