as
no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked
with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits
that were all that was to be seen of the girl.

"Ellen," she said.

The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved
her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should
have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.

"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."

Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled
like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.

"I know. We've got the vote."

"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."

The girl sat up. "When did he come?"

"Last night."

"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"

"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."

Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've
nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said
shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she
noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet
high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too
modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my
dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets
lose their value when they are disclosed...."

She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a
glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin.
Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity,
for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she
felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but
to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end
of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a
silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the
floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining
green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored
the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees
and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like
the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the
chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred
smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls,