Upstairs in the night nursery Mary sat in the nurse’s low chair.  Her year-old baby sprawled naked in her lap.  The elder infant stood whining under the nurse’s hands.

Mary had changed a little in three and a half years.  She was broader and stouter; the tender rose had hardened over her high cheek bones.  Her face still kept its tranquil brooding, but her slow gray eyes had a secret tremor, they were almost alert, as if she were on the watch.

And Mary’s mouth, with its wide, turned back lips, had lost its subtlety, it had coarsened slightly and loosened, under her senses’ continual content.

Gwenda brushed Mary’s mouth lightly with the winged arch of her upper lip.  Mary laughed.

“You don’t know how to kiss,” she said.  “If you’re going to treat Baby that way, and Molly too—­”

Gwenda stooped over the soft red down of the baby’s head.  To Gwenda it was as if her heart kept her hands off Rowcliffe’s children, as if her flesh shrank from their flesh while her lips brushed theirs in tenderness and repulsion.

But seeing them was always worse in anticipation than reality.

For there was no trace of Rowcliffe in his children.  The little red-haired, white-faced things were all Cartaret.  Molly, the elder, had a look of Ally, sullen and sickly, as if some innermost reluctance had held back the impulse that had given it being.  Even the younger child showed fragile as if implacable memory had come between it and perfect life.

Gwenda did not know why her fierceness was appeased by this unlikeness, nor why she wanted to see Mary and nothing but Mary in Rowcliffe’s children, nor why she refused to think of them as his; she only knew that to see Rowcliffe in Mary’s children would have been more than her flesh and blood could bear.

“You’ve come just in time to see Baby in her bath,” said Mary.

“I seem to be always in time for that.”

“Well, you’re not in time to see Steven.  He won’t be home till nine at least.”

“I didn’t expect to see him.  He told me he’d be out.”

She saw the hidden watcher in Mary’s eyes looking out at her.

“When did he tell you that?”

“Last Wednesday.”

The watcher hid again, suddenly appeased.

Mary busied herself with the washing of her babies.  She did it thoroughly and efficiently, with no sentimental tendernesses, but with soft, sensual pattings and strokings of the white, satin-smooth skins.

And when they were tucked into their cots and disposed of for the night Mary turned to Gwenda.

“Come into my room a minute,” she said.

Mary’s joy was to take her sister into her room and watch her to see if she would flinch before the signs of Steven’s occupation.  She drew her attention to these if Gwenda seemed likely to miss any of them.

“We’ve had the beds turned,” she said.  “The light hurt Steven’s eyes.  I can’t say I like sleeping with my head out in the middle of the room.”