From the dark fey shape he made against the firelight she knew that he was not thinking of her, that the life she had given him by her love no longer ran in his veins.  She scratched one of her wrists.  If she could have let the life he had given flow out of her veins she would have done it.  “Ay, do,” she said.  “I like you to be good to your mother.  You never know how long you may have her with you,” she added piously and not without cheerfulness.

He left her with a kiss that was dry and spurious like a paper flower.  She sank back into the chair and closed her eyes again, and listened for the closing of the front door which would leave her free to weep or rage or dance or do whatever would relieve the pressure of the moment on her brain.  She filled in the throbbing tune by thinking of the visitors.  It gave her a curious thrill, such as she might have felt if she had gratified her ambition to carry a heavy-plumed fan like Sarah Bernhardt’s, to reflect that she had sat in the same room with a bad woman.  A desire for unspecified adult things ran through her veins, as if she had just heard the strong initial blare of a band.  Then she checked all thoughts, for from the hall she heard the sound of argument.

The door was flung open by Marion.  She moved towards the hearth with a burly speed which marked this moment a crisis in the house of languid, inhibited movements, and cast herself down on a low stool by the fender.  Richard followed and stood over her, the firelight driving over his face like the glow of excited blood, the shadows lying in his eye-sockets like blindness.  She cried up at him:  “No, I will not go if you come too.  How can I go and sit listening to him, with you beside me hating him!” He swayed slowly, but did not answer.  She stripped herself of coat and furs and thrust them on him.  “There.  Take them up to my room.  I’m not going.  I’ll tell some lie.  Better than you hating him like this.  And while you’re up you’ll find some papers on my desk about the mortgage on Whitewebbs.  Attend to these.  And don’t come back just now.  You drive me mad when you hate Roger so.”

When he had softly shut the door she put her hand to her head and said:  “Oh, Ellen, what has happened to me?  I have lost all my strength.”

But her voice was still level, and she was but a squat, crouching mass against the firelight.  Ellen did not know whether she was really moved, nor, if she were, whether she could feel comradely with such emotion, since she had seen the woman blench at the thought of her son preaching in the street yet stay complacid at the prospect of him being lost in intellectual error.  So she did not answer.

“You must go for a long walk with Richard to-morrow,” said Marion presently.  “Over to Rochford, perhaps, where Anne Boleyn lived.  It’s pretty there.”

“That would be nice,” Ellen answered.  She liked it when they talked as if they were merely strangers.  “Do you think it will be fine to-morrow?  Richard said you were awful clever at telling the weather.”