She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.  Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions.  It would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as little as a flower.  Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping broken ground, calling out, “Ellen, Ellen!”

She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the hillside to the second she stopped.  Now she could see Ellen.  The girl was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations by the dripping from a ledge above.  It was the very place where Marion had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first moved within her.  She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the bickerings at Yaverland’s End, and had been resting there, looking down on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul.  All that she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird, and yet it changed the world.  In that instant she conceived Richard’s spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him.  Harry, who had been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself loved.  She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had fallen beyond Kerith Island.  Then her cold hands had told her that she must go home for the child’s sake; and as if in recognition of this act of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that made her cry out with joy.