The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had left Torque Hall that morning.  She had shaken her head and given a dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey.  Nor, when a few weeks later it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved.  She thought of it, indeed, but negligently.  She could imagine well how he had walked with his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, “I must get out of this.”  No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies.  It was not like her agony.  Nothing was simple there.  Destiny had struck her being a blow that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was confusion, and the best things were bad.

Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful.  Richard, who was beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her.  He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent.  But as she bent forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt constricted her heart.  For she knew that no woman who was going to have a child had any right to be as well as she was.  She knew that it meant that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child, that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child.  She knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her.  In these matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot with honour disown the doings of the body.  The plain fact was that she was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it.  Remorse dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge to judge her and bring this matter to an end.