with solemnity,
and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way,
"You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll
be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.
If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger,
she would succeed.

CHAPTER VI

Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking
and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay
in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone
from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by
nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and
love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning
for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later
years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the
afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever
rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as
one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own
thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that
the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle
of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it
specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two,
and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last
Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds
about the dark edges of the room.

"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.
She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began
to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning
their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.
"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys
say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because
always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down
and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to
infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.
But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile,
as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly,
"Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his
brows and staring at her with eyes t