when it is said of a man and woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact of their love.  The thought of her niece night after night shut up with love in the white belvedere all the long time the moon required to rise from the open sea, fill all the creeks with silver, and drain them dry again as she sunk westwards, must have been torment to one whose left cheek, from the long pale ear to the inhibited mouth, was one scar.  That scar was an epitome of all that was pathetic and mischievous about the poor faint woman, this being formed to be a nun who had not been blessed with any religion and so had to dedicate herself to the ridiculous god of decorum.  “Your aunt,” Marion’s mother had said to her, “burned her face cleaning a pair of white shoes with benzine for me to wear at my first Communion.  It was a pity she did it.  And a pity for me too, since I have had to obey her ever since in everything, though I wanted neither the white shoes nor the Communion.”  In that speech were all the elements of Alphonsine’s tragedy, and therefore most of the causes of Marion’s.  The French thrift that had made her clean the shoes at home, and thereby maim herself into something that desired to assassinate love whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the possibility that the family might have to support a fatherless baby.  The affection for her sister Pamela which had made her perform these services had enabled her to bring up that lovely child through all the dangers of a poverty-stricken childhood in Paris, in spite of a certain wildness in her beauty which might, if unchecked, have been a summons to disorder; and her triumph in that respect had made it the most heartbreaking disappointment when the temptations she thought she had baulked for ever in Paris twenty years before returned and claimed so easily Pamela’s child, whom she thought quite safe, since to her French eyes Marion’s dark brows, perpetually knit in preoccupation with the movements of her nature, were not likely to be attractive to men.

That must have added to her bitterness.  It must have seemed very cruel to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this black untidy girl.  That would account for the passion with which she forced Marion to do the thing she did not want to; and any suspicion that she was actuated by a desire to punish the girl for her happiness she would be able to dismiss by recollecting that certainly she had served her little sister’s welfare by crossing her will.  Oh, there was much to be said for Alphonsine.  But all the same, it was a pity that the old people had interfered.  She had loved Richard so much that it would not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far more than other children receive from both parents.  They might have been so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.