The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had, so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh.  She went on dully:  “Well, that’s all.  He turned at the gate and waved good-bye.  And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead.”  For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow.  When she raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling it, and stammered out:  “Richard, Richard, don’t you understand?  Don’t you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long before you ever met?  It was like that with Harry and me.  There was a part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each other—­and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn’t matter.  That part of us went on loving all the time, and making something—­something—­” Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot, and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance.  “It is so!” she cried defiantly.

The silence throbbed and was hot.  She dropped her head on her hand and envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.

He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door.  “I’m going to bed,” he said.

“That’s right,” she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table.  Uneasily he stood and watched her.

“Where does the Registrar live?” he asked suddenly.

“The Registrar?”

“Yes.  I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one does.”

“Of course, of course.  Well, the registrar’s named Woodham.  He lives in the house next the school.  ‘Mizpah,’ I think they call it.  He’s there only in the afternoon.  Did you specially want to go to-morrow?”

“Yes,” he said.  “Good-night.”

When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the table.  “Surely I’ve earned the right to dance a little now,” she thought grimly.  But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door.  She flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there would be the splash of water and final peace.  She had lost everything.  She had lost Richard.  When she had trodden on that loose board in the passage, that shut door might so easily have opened.  She had lost the memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive and despairing soul.  For it was the same memory now that she had spoken of it.  Virtue had gone out of it.  But she was too fatigued to grieve, and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad complaining of his own mortality.  She put out her hand to him and crooned, “There, there!” and told herself she must not fidget if he were there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered her.