gesticulating in her tight dame de compagnie black in the parlour below, stretching out her long lean neck like the spout of a coffee-pot to Grandmothers’ ear, she stood quite still, staring at the two women and hating them till they saw her and fell silent.  She did not take her gaze from them until Aunt Alphonsine put up her hand to cover her scar.  Then she knew that this wretched woman was at last afraid of her and would let her alone, and she turned contentedly to the room where Richard was.

But later on a misgiving seized her lest her aunt might have come as envoy from Peacey, and since she perceived that, her rage against the world was so visibly written on her that she inspired fear; she thought it best to give her boy into the charge of Peggy and to go over to Torque Hall herself.  She waited in the courtyard outside the servants’ quarters while they fetched him, and stood with her head high, so that the faces peering at her from the windows should see nothing of her torment, at the corner of the gardens that was visible through the gracious Tudor archway.  There was nothing showing save a few pale mauve clots of Michaelmas daisies standing flank-high in the slanting dusty shafts of evening sunshine, and the marble Triton, glowing gold in answer to the sunset, with gold autumn leaves scattered on his pedestal.  But she knew very well how fair it all must be beyond, where she could not see—­the broad grass walk stretching between the wide, formal flowerbeds, well tended but disordered with the lateness of the year, to the sundial and the chestnut grove.  How could Harry, who had loved her, possess all this and not want to share it with her?  She could have sobbed like a child whose playmate is not kind, had not Peacey stood at her elbow.  “I want to give you warning that if ever you come near me again I will kill you,” she said.  He looked sharply at her and she saw that he was convinced and discomfited.  But suddenly he smiled.  She went home, wondering uneasily why he should have smiled, but came to the conclusion that this was simply one of his mystifications and that he had simply been trying to cover his defeat.  It was an extraordinary fact that there never once occurred to her that possibility, the thought of which, she afterwards realised, had made Peacey smile.  The truth was that she never thought directly of that night’s horror, but, perhaps because of that fantasy about the wounded youth which had vexed her delirium, she always disguised it in her mind as an encounter with a wild beast, and the expectation of human issue no more troubled her than it would a woman who had been gored by a boar.