“I’m sure I don’t care.  I’m fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the teeth....”  She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:  “Take one.  They’re violet cachous.”  Sucking one, she sat forward with her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk restlessly about the room.  She halted at the window and asked thickly:  “That place over the other side of the river.  Where there’s a glow in the sky.  Is that Chatham?”

With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in Chatham High Street.  She murmured tremulously:  “I think Richard said it was.”

“Ah, Chatham’s a nice place,” said Poppy in a surly voice.  She pressed her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage.  It was quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.

Then Marion had been right.  A wave of terror washed over Ellen.  What chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl’s brutishness?  She stammered, “Well, good-night, I’ll away to my bed,” and ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes fall here and there on the floor.  In the first moments after she turned out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes.  And once, when she was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and crying acidly:  “And do you think we will have to spend every night searching for your mother, Richard?” But very soon she slept.

She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had whispered into her ear.  She sat up and looked through the great window into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two.  There was no one in the farmyard.  Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound of men’s voices; of Richard’s voice, she could be almost sure, for there was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness.  There was no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been unsuccessful.  She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort.  Mabel, the parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in her hand.  One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut on her face.  Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look like that.  They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.