During all the months her child was moving in her body she was visited by dreams of spring.  This was the best of dreams:  it was real.  The lark’s song and Harry’s happy laughter were loud in her ears; and she rolled over in her bed and opened her eyes on Grandmother and Aunt Alphonsine.  She looked away from them, but saw only things that reminded her how ill she was; the tumbler of milk she had not been able to drink, set in a circle of its own wetness on a plate among fingers of bread-and-butter left from the morning; they had been told to tempt her appetite, but they were betraying that they felt she had had more than enough temptation lately; the bottles of medicine ranged along the mantelpiece, high-shouldered like the facades of chapels and pasted with labels that one desired to read as little as chapel notice-boards, and with contents just as ineffectual at their business of establishing the right; the jug filled with a bunch of flowers left by some kindly neighbour who did not know what was the matter with her.

That raised difficult issues.  She turned her eyes back to the old people.  They looked terrible:  Grandmother sitting among her spreading skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign.  Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons, the velvet homes of elfs—­reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that colours have commonly only in twilight.

But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power over her.  She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry her lover’s butler.  He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared, and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his own.  “What, Peacey?” she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow, “Peacey?  Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!” And Aunt Alphonsine had said “Hush!” at the squire’s name, being to the core of her soul a dame de compagnie; and Grandmother had said, with that use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of truthfulness to many, “Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come back to protect you.  He could come back if he liked, you know, dear.”