charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life explained the abandonment of old habit.  But her eyes travelled to the luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness, overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything else in the glittering, brittle world around her.

Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under Richard’s stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within herself.  She found some consolation in the thought that people were always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white, view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland’s End.  For Marion stood by the hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she turned an impassive face towards them, and asked indifferently, “Have you had a nice walk?” and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more desperate than any other being’s outflung arms.  She was all that Ellen had remembered, and more.  And she had infected the destiny of this house with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the midday meal.  For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast mutton, and said:  “Please, ma’am, there’s a man wanting to see you.”  And Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl:  “Who is he?” Mabel answered contemptuously:  “He won’t give his name.  He’s a very poor person, ma’am.  His boots is right through, and his coat’s half off his back.  And he says that if he told you his name you mightn’t see him.  Shall I tell him to go away?”

But Marion had started violently.  Her eyes were looking into Richard’s.  She said, calmly:  “Yes, I’ll see him.  Tell him I’ll come through in a minute.”

Mabel had left the room.  Marion and Richard continued to stare at each other queerly.

She murmured indistinctly, casually:  “It may be.  Both Mabel and cook haven’t been with me long.  They never saw him here.  They probably haven’t seen him since he was a boy.”

“It is the kind of thing,” said Richard grimly, “that Roger would say at the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and unsuspicious.”