Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.  “She killed herself, of course,” he said in an undertone.

“Oh no!” she cried.  “Oh no!”

But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory.  There had been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen’s mind....  “What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over me?”

“Oh no!” she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was deafened and dizzied and ask why.  “Never think that of her, my dearie.”

She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint, barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook.  But these had been alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should understand her sacrifice and grieve.

“Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood,” she nearly shrieked, so that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.  “She wore high heels for her age—­”

That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window.  She was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the chill of the universe:  her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.  This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she had gone back on it.

“And things looked so strange last night.  If there was a skin of ice on the wood it’d be hard to tell it from the moonlit water....”

Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room where sat her son, whom she would never see again.  “If I had not gone to the window then,” thought Ellen to herself, “she might have looked much longer.”

“She was very ugly last night,” muttered Richard.  “She was always ugly when she was unhappy.”

His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not know for certain that Marion had committed suicide.  She must conceal her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs.  “My dear, you’d never think it if you’d seen her last night....”

“Tell me everything.  All she did after I went upstairs.”

Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.  Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do nothing but answer it.  It was the third time she had told this story in the twelve hours.  “She was as bright as could be.  Talked of going to a theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as anything....”  Her voice was thin, as liars’ voices are.  Surely he must notice it and feel distaste.  Oh, fatal Marion!  Even in her complete and final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of force that the world about her was shattered.  For Ellen perceived that never again would the relationship