It was partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some months that she was going to have Peacey’s child.  It was indeed a rainy December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was little Jack Harken, because he was whistling “Good King Wenceslas,” as he always did, and would not go to answer him, although she knew Grandmother and Peggy were both in the dairy, because she was distraught with her own degradation.  Her encounter with Peacey had been like being shown some picture from a foul book and being obliged to stare at it till it was branded on her mind, so that whenever she looked at it she saw it also, stamped on the real image like the superscription on a palimpsest.  But now she felt as if she herself had become a picture in a foul book.  And she was quite insane with a sense of guilt towards Richard.  This discovery had, of necessity, meant that she must wean him, and her obsession interpreted their conflict between them that had naturally followed as a wrangle between them as to her responsibility for this evil.  Now he was lying in his cot screaming with rage, his clean frock and the sheets running with the rivulets of milk that he had spat out and struck from the teat of the bottle she was forcing on him, and she was sobbing, for this sort of thing had been going on for days, “I can’t help it, darling, I can’t help it.”

Then Jackie began to thump rhythmically on the door below, and she ran down, maddened with so much noise, and snatched the letter he held out to her.  At the writing on the envelope her heart stood still.  She recanted all she had lately thought of Harry.  Hatred and resentment fell from her.  The promise of her lover’s near presence came on her like a south wind blowing over flowers.  At his message that he was waiting for her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is—­a shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its mate’s hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable gold.  In her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell, because her lover’s arms would so soon be round her.

She was amazed, for she had not yet had leisure or the heart to look out of the window, that beneath her the marshes crackled white with sunlit snow, and a blue sea stretched to the rosy horizon that girdles bright frosty days.  Even as this beauty had lain unseen under her windows, so had her happiness waited unsuspected.  She did not see him till she was close upon him, for he was striding up and down between the last two trees of the elm hedge.  Her heart ached when she saw him standing, brilliantly lovely