That was, of course, quite true.  He could have come back.  It was true that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to have his child.  She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still that they left her.  Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and shrieked lamentations.  It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been sacred to her child:  but there was not the least fear in her heart that it would ever come to pass.  She had not known how often the old people would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.

Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years, inexplicable.  Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider.  It is not in the nature of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good purpose which that tedious companionship had served.  The theory of the sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and necessary to the existence of society.  But she had so often been assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those doubts.  To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have been better if she had not been born.  “Lord have mercy on us all!” thought Marion, and forgave her.

It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally.  She was the most responsible for the defeat of Marion’s life.  And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not malignant of intent.  The worst of illicit relationships is the provocation they give to the minds that hear of them.  When it is said of a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the sober external results of marriage; but