With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she abruptly rose to go.  But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity that had vexed her for years.

“Tell me,” she asked.  “How did you get rid of Peacey?  Was it money?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Not altogether.  You see, I found out something about him....”

She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had perpetuated.

So, a week later, Susan Rodney came.  Her visit was a great humiliation.  She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow floods.  She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table.  And because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was sending away her own child.  During the twenty-four hours she was at Yaverland’s End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she found sleeping difficult in the air of this house.  This might have been in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion’s enquiries as to how he was getting on at Dawlish.

“He’s doing ever so well, and he’s made the place a picture,” she would begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer, and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious man she had slighted.  But the greater part of her loathing was that which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.

Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had suffered, for Susan was a kind woman.  Instead she did everything she could to encourage it.  She told no lies, although by now her efforts to win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly in her dealings with humanity.  She liked Susan too much for that.  Merely she made no attempt to disguise her personality.  After the children had gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the other’s ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not bloom.  She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the Ten Commandments.