the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped.  Something in the orchard below had waylaid his attention.  Ellen looked down the steep bank to see what it was, and saw Marion sitting in the low crook of an apple-tree.  She snatched at contemptuous notice of the way that the tail of the woman’s gown, which anyway was far too good for any sensible person to wear just going about the house and garden in the morning, was lying in a patch of undispersed frost; but fear re-entered her heart.  Marion was sitting quite still with her back to them, yet the distant view of her held the same terrifying quality of excess as her near presence.

There could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat, stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.

Richard said:  “No, she isn’t crying.  She isn’t moving.  I should feel a fool if I went down and she didn’t want me.”  And because his voice was thin and husky like a nervous child’s, and because he was answering a question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid.  This woman was throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....

* * * * *

But these were only the things that one thought about life.  As soon as one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be.  The world was not really tragic.  When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure, and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even now, since the water looked so smooth.  He answered that winter boating was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had had one late December afternoon.  He spoke of finding his way among white oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the primrose moon on the right.  She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.