To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, “What’s that church up there?”

“It’s Roothing Church.  It’s very old.  It’s a famous landmark.”

“But what’s that white thing beside it?”

“Oh, that!” said Marion, looking seawards.  “That is the tomb of Richard’s father.”

“Indeed,” breathed Ellen uncomfortably.  “He must,” she said, determined not to be daunted by an awkward situation, “have been well thought of in the neighbourhood.”

“Why?” asked Marion.

“It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it not?”

“No, but you are right.  It has the look of something raised by public subscription.”  She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung back her head and looked at the monument and laughed.  Really, Richard had chosen very well.  Always before she had averted her eyes from that white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been able to prison him in her arms.  Now that this girl had expressed its architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her.  That secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror that followed them.  Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not to be brought back to life by any sacrifice.  Her love ran up the hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had been between them was recreated.  She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare.  She was facing the situation gallantly, but found it distasteful.  “What is this?” Marion asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the unnecessary excitements of the young.  “What is this fuss?  Ah, she thinks it is dreadful of me to look at Richard’s father’s tomb and laugh.”  There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable with the effort.  “Let’s come on.  Round this bend of the bank there’s a bed of young osiers.  How fortunate that the sun has just come out!  They’ll look fine....  You know what osiers are like in the winter?  Or don’t they grow up North?...”