She shook her head and he went on his errand.  With a sense of leisure, as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about her.  Roger did not frighten her at all.  If his spirit was in the room it was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop.  But the horror of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy.  She perceived the miraculous beauty of the common lot.  Men and women taking children home in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged but gravely glad....  Ah, that wedding-party....  She wept, she wept.

He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.

“Come,” he said.  “Come.”

CHAPTER XI

Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...

Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply.  There had been indeed no tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to take him.  Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden staircase leading out of destiny.  And when he left her to see if they could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be there when he returned.

But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies:  the insane sexual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive steadfastness of women.  Roger had died, Richard was about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female faults—­Harry and Marion ...  Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and father....  And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life’s disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous.  Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother’s love; and how like a doom that love had lain on him....  Since life was like this, she would not do what Richard asked.  She tried to rise that she might flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.