at railway-stations.  The rapidity with which she had changed from the brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the perfection with which she had assumed this bland and glossy personality at a moment’s notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration.  She liked the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate.  She was glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel proud on joining a pirate crew.  She went over and stood beside Richard and slipped her arm through his.  Uneasily she was aware that now she, too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it was.  She drooped her head against Richard’s shoulder, and hoped all might be well with all of them.

“You see, mother, since I saw you I’ve had trouble—­I’ve had trouble—­” Roger was stammering.

Marion turned from him to Richard.  “Ring for tea,” she said, “and turn on the lights.  All the lights.  Even the lights we don’t generally use.”

Roger clung to her.  “I don’t want to hide anything from you, mother,” he began, but she cut him short.  “Oh, what cold hands!  Oh, what cold hands!” she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him.  As the lights went up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as long and yellowish and covered with warts.  The parlourmaid came in and, over her shoulder, Marion said easily:  “Tea now, Mabel.  There’re five of us.  And we’ll have it down here at the table.”

She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an armchair at the hearth.  All her movements were easy and her face wore a look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant was going in and out of the room.  It was true that he did not speak when she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been talking of something to the discredit of them all.  Ellen felt disgust in watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation, which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched Marion.  She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in their hair.  Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors, were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body, taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth.  It was no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.