All consciousness soon left her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.  Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her.  She saw it as a lovely naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side, where it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body, sitting by with its haunches in a spring.  She cried out to herself:  “You can rise above this!  This is only a physical thing,” but her own answer came:  “Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing.  Yet it was a sacrament and gave you life.  There is white magic and black magic.  This is a black sacrament, and it will give you death.”  Her soul fainted into utter nothingness.

She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs.  She dragged herself up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.  But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters.  She looked over her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow of the lamp the night before.  It was evident that Peacey had set it in order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing she had left crumpled on the table.  At this manifestation of his peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son’s room.  But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty had through all previous agonies reassured her.  But the eastern sky was inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before, and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch wounds.  Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had happened to her one of earth’s ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking on could make good.  But turning to her child to still his crying, she saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and she ran to him.  She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the criminal face of the morning.

From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest isolation.  She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now why Grandmother had been so preoccupied that she let the tail of her shawl trail on the ground as she went upstairs that night, and why Cousin Tom Stallybrass had not come in to tell how the calf had gone at Prittlebay market.  When one afternoon she came to the head of the stairs and saw Aunt Alphonsine