have, the look of being underpaid.  Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.  The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement, would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator’s lying prospectus.  When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there would be a quarrel.  “Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?” She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to remain in the sitting-room to weep.  She would not look pretty when she wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean living on this damp and disappointing place.  Presently he would go out, leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation, while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a meal.

Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was feeling about the loss of the child.  But immediately she laughed aloud at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an errand.  If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore having official intelligence about immortality.  Her lips were sealed with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard.  She could not talk to strangers.  She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard’s future was to be happy.

Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.  Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with Richard.  It must be wonderful to be Richard’s sweetheart.  Marion had seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there