rench window of the dining-room, and
crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in
which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out
to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild
orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an
orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This
is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is
let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was
always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."

"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following
was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not
answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not
spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was
so keen on science?"

But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were
patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need
adventure...."

"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved
half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire
to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard,
and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that
Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be
miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the
leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the
leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel
there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been
any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"

"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.

"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.

"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she
paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She
knew quite well.

It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet
at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea,
which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was
lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened
pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of
the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough
darkness without quality. Yet as they w