She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes.  But all the windows were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the death of anything.  She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor.  Men who were lost in the bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their coats.  She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood.  “Take those books off the armchair and sit down,” she ordered in her rough, soft voice.

For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, “Let’s go to bed.  It must be past four.”  There was an upward inflection in her naming of the hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew followed always on her imagining of brighter things.  But it was not yet three.  “I can’t think why we’re sitting up like this,” she continued scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his arms, crying, “Richard!  Richard!” His heart seemed to break in two.  He held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep.  “But I have so many things to remember,” she reminded him.  Turning her face away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a thousand thorns.  But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly, glowingly, sadly.  “Ah, darling!” she said.  “It is very late.  Perhaps if you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now.”  But it was he that had slept....

And she was going through a bad time like that now.

When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not greatly want to go.  He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this afternoon.  Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.  But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life.  He certainly would not make love to Ellen.  He hoped that she was not so wonderful as he had remembered her.