to the garden to gather burning leaves and put
them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted
candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her
pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which
these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and
Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and
sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost
nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better
than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he
would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her
about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would
settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would
tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.

On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together,
and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found
the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine.
They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried
horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see
Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it
were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there
met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings,
and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the
sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels
thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled
and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its
flames.

Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness
and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and
lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it
was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his
body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and
unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings
as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride
ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his
behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable
conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his
spirit were poure