She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and smoothed from it certain lines of loathing.  Bowing her head, she murmured a remonstrance to some power.

But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.

CHAPTER VII

He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare, lifting his cap and saying, “I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,” so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded.  She laughed teasingly.  The hard line of him softened, and he said, “Mother,” and stepped over the threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and hair.  She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love.  This indoor darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous stencillings on the night.  There was nothing solid in the world but their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.

She did not ask him why he had come at this hour.  There was indeed nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat outside save the writhing sea.  It had always seemed appropriate to their relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without warning and against the common custom.  Thus had he come to be born.

She pushed him away from her.  “Have you put your motor-cycle in the shed?” she asked indifferently.

“No.  It’s outside the gate.”

“Put it in.  There may be frost by the morning.”

He turned away to do it.  To him it was always heaven, like the peace of dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.

She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish.  This was a strange night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were co-operating with nature.  She had a fancy that if she strained her ears she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge electric