She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose at six.  Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look up into her grandmother’s face, which she did not like, for though the expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been, it was now overlaid with a patina of malice.  She would smile now, as she dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope that its fruit might be destroyed.  The room would be tidied; her drowsy head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of paper.  Out of consideration for Lady Teresa’s feelings the photograph of Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards.  That she would not really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.

Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking personality of Lady Teresa.  She would bring with her a quantity of warm black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at Torque House.  By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry.  The child would doubt again....  Since these things would have happened she could not do other than she did.  Her surrender was the price she had to pay for Richard’s life.

How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to pay any real price!  She looked back through the past at Peacey’s conduct of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at some perfect and obscene work of art.  He had laid his hand so wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the renunciation of all greeds.  And that candid, reverent gaze which he turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to one who had shivered under sidelong leers.  He had indeed that supreme mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante love of virtues.  He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and, knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as their messenger.  Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship, she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had failed utterly.