“She won’t turn you away.”

There was folly, there was innocence in Roger’s failure to notice that Richard was speaking not in reassurance but in grimness, as one might speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place where he stood.  “You ought to know, old chap,” he murmured hopefully.  “She’s always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me....  I don’t know....  Oh, I’ve prayed....”

“Well, you’ll know for yourself in a minute,” said Richard.  “I heard the front door open and close a second ago.”

Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother’s being.  She longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all the other things, but again he wouldn’t pay attention to her.  Indeed, he could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up to pain and apprehension.  Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the case against Roger.  He was sickening like something that has been fried in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral flaw made it all the more sinister.  If there was not vileness in his will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor, and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair.  She looked at him accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum version of the emotion of embarrassment was sucking and gnawing one of her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used despitefully.  Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.

The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger.  But when Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else, because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held in her hand.

There was stillness till Richard whispered:  “Mother.”

She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, “Oh, Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the parlour.”

He answered softly:  “No one broke it.  The wind blew it down when I opened the door to Roger.”

Her eyes did not move from his.  Her mouth was a round hole.  He put out his hand to take the piece of china from her.  They both gazed down on it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance.  She gave it to him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger.  When she found him she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the brass buttons, and the brass studs on his high collar.  Then she became aware of the woman, and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her uniform.  His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters on the magenta ribbon.