whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves
had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had
been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly
nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo
knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical
adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment
dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to
live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and
have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill
and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the
shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it
and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next
day it would forsake her.

She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer
from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose
at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was
necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look
up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the
expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been,
it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she
dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that
Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the
church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl
who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope
that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy
head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of
paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of
Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not
really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and
tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.

Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking
personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm
black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of
Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a
profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that
Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its
bagging chi