that had
been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and
found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the
situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion
asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the
unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks
it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh."
There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she
tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable
with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a
bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out!
They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or
don't they grow up North?..."

They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the
neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely
inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a
geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and
even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like
orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard.
Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours
which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an
osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange
hair of the young plants.

"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult
to them."

Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a
look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of
letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should
go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah
Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and
made it squalid with tin huts.

"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to
laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and
had things thrown at them.

It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own
Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to
it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the
Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable
people...."

"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."

But to that Marion rep