He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said:  “Where’s Marion?”

It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the window, of the dark loiterer in the garden.  Murmuring, “Oh, she’ll be back in a minute,” she opened her arms to him.

He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very close.  “Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run across the road!” he whispered in her ear.  She knew immediately, from the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself with it.  She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he avoided her kiss and said irritably:  “I wonder if Roger made an awful ass of himself preaching to-night?”

“I’ve no doubt,” answered Ellen, “that he made Jesus most dislikeable.  But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a setback here and there.”

“It’s not that I’m worrying about,” he told her.  “I can’t bear having mother’s name bandied about again after the hell of a time she’s had.”  He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.

Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee.  She would have liked to take his face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers; but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill with his obsession.  She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer, closer.  It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with him.  The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as itself.  She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye first saw.

“’Lamport and Holt. Bruyere, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for Rosario. Lalande, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande. Leighton, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. Vestris, left Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.’  Richard, have you ever been to Pernambuco?”

“Once,” he said.

“What like is it?” she said in her Scotch way.

“Oh, I don’t know....  It’s supposed to be like Venice.”

“Like Venice?  Why?”

“Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing....”

She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure.  If he had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother’s woes had made him grievously sick in his soul.  “Ah, well!” she said; and let the silence settle.