As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before.  Now that her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it.  That night she wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week before Christmas.

* * * * *

Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it threw on the ceiling.  Half-past one.  She rolled over and cried into the pillow, “Richard!  Richard!” She had already been three hours in bed.  There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her brainpan.

* * * * *

When, three days later, she received Peacey’s letter saying that he would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.  It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was declaring his desire freely.  That made her very happy, for she knew that love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy than her insincerity.  She did not tell Richard, because she could not have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney’s letter came.  She had sat with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in subjection.  Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this.  Out of his cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute.  She wished she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear.  The clock ticked, and not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey and he knew it.