knew that she would side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.  They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed.  Nothingness would swallow up her Richard.  To free herself from her fear she leaped out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.  Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb.  “Oh, Harry,” she cried, “I’m not blaming you, but if you’d stuck to me it would have been so different....”

If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb.  Harry would not have died if he had been with her.  The procreative genius of her body would have kept him in life to give her more.  Her last-born child would still have been quite young.  It was to him she would have gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of immunity from sorrow or profound thinking.  She would have watched his face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day’s game, until she longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him.  Then she would have turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them threatened, not one of them doomed....

Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.  The thought was bitter.  She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her house.  It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.  Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard’s destiny.  She fixed her eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, “Ellen....  Ellen....”

There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric bell.

She looked at the clock by her bedside.  It was three o’clock.  She said to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange things have happened assume when they fear that yet another is approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation, “It’s late for anyone to call.”

But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.

She cried out, “Ah, yes!” She knew who it was.  It was Roger, come in rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself.  She hurried over to her wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, “Roger, Roger, Roger! ...  Why, it’s you, Roger!...  Come in.  Come in, my boy....  What is it, my poor lad?...”