life and love.  For the moon sees none but lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent.  So it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself.  It had seemed to Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the moon’s faith in them.  Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to hunger for something hardly to be attained by man.  Perhaps his son, if he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had forgotten.  She said eagerly:  “Richard, before you go to bed, let us go out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island.”

“No,” he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap.  She began to rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation.  There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that there was no hope, things never went well on this earth.  Then he exclaimed suddenly, “Marion.”

“Yes?”

She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of Ellen’s magic which he loved and desired to share with her.  But he muttered, “That box on the dresser.  Up there on the top shelf.”

She followed his eyes in amazement.  “The scarlet one in the corner?  That belongs to cook.  I think it’s her workbox.  What about it?”

He stared at it with a drowsy smile.  “You had a cloak that colour when I was a child,” he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.

“Why, so I had,” she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, “How he loves me!  He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good ale that he could drink.  He speaks like a sweetheart....”  And then caught her breath.  “But that,” she wept on, “is how he ought to speak of Ellen, not of me.”  A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong, competent hands, and said to herself uneasily:  “I wish life could be settled by doing things and not by thinking....”  But the conviction had, by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind.  She cried out to herself in anguish:  “Of course!  Of course!  He cannot love Ellen because he loves me too much!  He has nothing left to love her with!” A tide of exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement within her of the pride that leads to death.  For if Richard went on loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do.  The girl would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its heart hurt as dear little Ellen.  And there would be no future.  She would have no grandchildren.  When she died he would be so lonely....  And it was her own fault.  All her life long she had let him see how she wanted love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry’s failure; and so he had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his own needs.  “What can I do to put this right?” she asked herself.  “What can I do?”