“Yes, it’s all right,” she told him pettishly; and then tried to make amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion.  “I can understand why your mother thought it would do her good to go out.  If you’ve lived all your life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you.  No doubt,” she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion’s more pathetic aspect, “the poor thing’s gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young.  Richard, Richard, what have I said?”

He looked at her coldly.  “Nothing.  What could you have said?” But he went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him hasten, and opened it and stepped outside.  Against the moonlight he was only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful look of rage which had made her cry aloud.  He stepped in again and said:  “I’m sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her.”

She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with him.  “May I come with you?” she asked through tears.

“No, no, it wouldn’t be any fun for you,” he answered fussily, “scrambling about these fields in the dark.”

“Let me come with you!” she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be to him sombre with the day’s events, and cried:  “I shall feel afraid, waiting here.”

“Very well.  Go and put your things on.  But be quick.”

He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged the time spent in waiting for her.  Wearily she followed him out of the window.  From what her mother had told her about men, she had always known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that she was being tiresome when she was not.  But she would never have believed that it could come so soon.  And it was spoiling her.  She no longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of her own nobility.  Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his presence no matter at what price.  There was no knowing where all this would end.

But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had handed it.  The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard, while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like walking on beaten silver.  Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on