She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey.  She realised that she was safe.  If she could rest now she would keep her child.  She knew relief but not exultation.  It was as if life had been handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed with the cup.  There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon:  the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she had been rescued.  When Peacey’s voice had boomed out above her it had expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and he begged them to have similar prudence.  He had risked nothing of his reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her.  To this loathsome world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her divine child.  She looked up at Peacey and laughed.

His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness.  “You’d best come into Cliffe’s cottage,” he said, and went before her.  It struck her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or without his knowledge.  Well, she must lie down, and this was the only door that was open to her.  She must follow him.

Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur:  “Poor little girl!” Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in his heart spoken to itself?  Was he really a kind man?  She looked at him searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes, which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing.  In any case she must take his arm, or she would fall.  She even found herself shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she was afraid the people inside might not welcome her.  She did not know the Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make friends with a young married woman.  But its trim garden, where on golden summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion wishing that Harry and she were properly married.  Because she had received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy.  But the shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into some vacated house given over to decay.  There was dust everywhere, and the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the