er. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as
if it needed reassurance.

But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very
difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of
him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never
felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving
nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in
order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage
which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was
eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel
either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in
different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the
immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the
other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when
she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great
distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she
marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for
love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would
never mature.

The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another
eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque
Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed
between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she
was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but
she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so
after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past
each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift
her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she
would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful,
and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was
as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a
band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were
contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be
pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's
breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the
other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it
would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its