The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger.  It had been unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation of the note of love.  It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur, “Oh, but he was speaking the truth.  I’m quite comfortably off.  I’ve come to pay the jeweller,” and watch the look of amazement on the hot, high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man, and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no longer.  Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger.  Marion felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to feel.

She liked, too, going into the jeweller’s shop and sitting there under the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely voice that she had learned from her lover:  “Yes, but I don’t want you to take them back.  I want to pay for them.  There seems to have been some misunderstanding.  There is no difficulty about the money at all.  My son only wanted you to wait till his quarter’s allowance came.  I have the money here in notes.  If you would count it....”  She was playing a mother’s part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller’s eyes were examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes.  For she had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly because she liked to look well in Richard’s eyes; that this had served Roger’s end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt.  She hurried back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him as he sobbed out his ridiculous story:  “Oh, mummie, I never would have done it if I hadn’t gone mad.  You see, mummie, Queenie’s such a glorious woman....”

But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper.  He sat up suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with pale, desperate eyes.  She clapped her hand across her face and then took it away again, and said softly:  “What is it, dear?” But he had sunk into a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.  She could get nothing out of him.  He obviously did not want her to stay two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her train, “Mummie, I do love you, mummie.  I do love you.  And thank you, mummie....”  But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course.  For since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space, there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....