thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a canal; and though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the belvedere.  The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go so far.  But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran from the glebe land opposite Yaverland’s End and stretched towards the village High Street.  No one ever went there at this time of day.

Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown.  Stealing out very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers.  She had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side.  The purplish cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife.  The Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering.  The Crimson Ramblers understood all that had happened to her.  She loved to imagine it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married, and she slightly resented for her child’s sake that she was not receiving that homage.  Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by some wise, far-sighted person.

It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon, to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will to the world.  She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that it was not always malign.  She imagined that Harry would come back before the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of her.  Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come to her.  It was his mother’s fault.  She had made him marry when he was twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul.  With aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.