ere it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body,
sitting by with its haunches in a spring. She cried out to herself: "You
can rise above this! This is only a physical thing," but her own answer
came: "Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing. Yet it was a
sacrament and gave you life. There is white magic and black magic. This
is a black sacrament, and it will give you death." Her soul fainted into
utter nothingness.

She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself
up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.
But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and
made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over
her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish
early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow
of the lamp the night before. It was evident that Peacey had set it in
order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing
she had left crumpled on the table. At this manifestation of his
peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son's
room. But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was
ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first
to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty
had through all previous agonies reassured her. But the eastern sky was
inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before,
and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the
barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch
wounds. Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had
happened to her one of earth's ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking
on could make good. But turning to her child to still his crying, she
saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on
the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty
and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and
she ran to him. She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the
criminal face of the morning.

From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest
isolation. She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing
what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but
she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now
why Gra