The world had deceived her utterly that day; and yet there was one in that cottage who had suffered more than she, for by her suffering she had bought no Richard.  Poor Mrs. Cliffe!  She was a woman of sixty now, white-haired, and fine-featured with the anxious fineness of one who has for long lived out of favour with herself and has laboured hard for re-establishment; but the fear still dwelt in her.  Most times that Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly.  But every now and then, perhaps once a year, she would put down her knitting so soon as Marion came in sight and come into the road to meet her and would give her nervous, absent-minded greetings.  Then she would draw her into the furthest edge of the pavement, because the blind have such sharp hearing, and she would whisper: 

“Have you heard from him lately?”

“No.”

“He’s still at Dawlish?”

“They say so.”

“Do you think he will ever come back?”

“No.  He will never come back.”

“Ah.”  She would stand looking past Marion with her face cat’s-pawed by memory and her fingers teasing the fringe of her shawl, till from the garden the blind old man would cry lovingly and querulously, “Trixy, where are you?” and she would answer, “Coming, dearie.”  As she turned away she would murmur:  “I shouldn’t like him to come back....”

Poor Trixy Cliffe!  She should have known only the sorrow of pure femalehood, such sorrow as makes the eyes of heifers soft.  Women like her should be harvested like corn in their time of ripening, stored in good homes as in sound barns, and ground in the mill of wifehood and motherhood into the flour that makes the bread by which the people live.  But there must have been some beauty working in her soul, for Peacey went only where he saw some opportunity to cancel some movement towards the divine, being a missionary spirit.  So she had been delivered over to that terror which survived for ever.  Even in the exorcised blue territory of a good old woman’s eyes.  “Oh, poor Trixy, poor Trixy!” moaned Marion, weeping.  But it struck her that she was enjoying herself, and she sat up rigidly and searched her soul for the smuggled insincerity.  “I must be lying,” she said aloud with loathing.  “I really cannot be pitying Trixy Cliffe because in my heart of hearts I care for no one but Richard.  I would knead the flesh of anyone on earth and bake it in the oven if that were the only food I could give him.  What am I doing this for?  Ah, I see.  I am hanging about this fictitious emotion simply because I do not wish to go on and remember Roger.”  She held out her hands into the blackness and cried out, “Oh, Roger, forgive me for shutting you out of my memory as I have shut you out of everything else.  I will remember everything, I will!” She lay down and let all pictures reappear before her eyes, but her mouth was drawn down at the corners.