“I think I’ll go now,” said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.  Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly:  “Why are you looking at me like that?” But he would not answer, and began to laugh quietly.  “Tell me!” she begged, but still he kept silence, and seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but would not disclose.  It struck her as another example of Marion’s dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room after she had left it and that it should blot out the son’s habitual splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly:  “Oh, very well, be a Cheshire cat if you feel called to it,” and went and pretended to look for a volume in the bookcase.  It was annoying that he did not come after her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front door.

She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above the shoulder of her own image in the glass door of the bookcase, and was at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling, she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored world might be one that was her mother.  She knew that it was too much to ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how God could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow.  “And quite right too,” she said to herself.  “If there were ghosts we would spend all our time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we’d not do our duty by the living.  But surely there’d be no harm just for once, when I’m so put about with this strange house, in letting me see in the glass just the outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders....”  But there was nothing.  She sobbed and caught at Richard’s hands, and was instantly reassured.  For the hand is truer to the soul than the face:  it has no moods, it borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to find in the robust.  “You’ve got grand hands!” she cried, and kissed them.  But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance.  She was astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her on to his knee and began to kiss her.