ting in that steady
delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated
between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete
abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his
stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of
the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She
hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend,
whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished
home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and
disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and
soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life
explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the
luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where
Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness,
overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the
hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the
squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything
else in the glittering, brittle world around her.

Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under
Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within
herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were
always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their
absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white,
view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the
hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she
turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have
you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of
her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more
desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen
had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house
with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the
midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast
mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And
Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had
noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is
he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very
poor person, ma'am. His