once absurd and menacing
about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's
greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to
have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich
expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.

To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that
church up there?"

"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."

"But what's that white thing beside it?"

"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of
Richard's father."

"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined
not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in
the neighbourhood."

"Why?" asked Marion.

"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it
not?"

"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public
subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung
back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard
had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that
white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much
to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who
seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been
able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its
architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement
and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality
should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That
secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from
remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she
had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time
when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for
the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell
on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror
that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than
hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than
to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and
smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not
to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the
hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing