once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat
until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front
door.

She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above
the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was
at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but
because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling,
she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the
smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored
world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to
ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again
in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little
bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God
could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right
too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our
time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the
living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put
about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the
outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.
She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly reassured.
For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it
borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved
in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts
commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the
broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only
frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve
and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to
find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed
them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her
wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body
close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was
astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and
felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to
him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her
on to his knee and began to kiss her.

But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain
expression of a man who is p