The Judge Part 24

And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for an Ess.e.x small-holding. A broken bal.u.s.trade round the verandah, heavy wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one pa.s.sed in the rain there was always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything but weak-eyed, plain people.

The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.

Perhaps he would kneel down among those gla.s.s bells which, when they are bogged in Ess.e.x clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.

The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement, would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"

She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out, leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the gla.s.s bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation, while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a meal.

Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by pa.s.sing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the antic.i.p.ation of meeting strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to be happy.

Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible.

Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed in his own pa.s.sion for any of them, and therefore there had always been something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as dignified as befitted one who came as an amba.s.sador from life itself, and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarra.s.sment. She was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.

There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said, "Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she followed him down the hillside that n.o.body since the world began had ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner, and she became scarlet with shame.

When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now.

Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."

At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away, wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of pa.s.sion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.

With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time that synchronised with the beginning of some n.o.ble course of action.

She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black....

She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the G.o.ds had told him that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more beautifully than she had ever been.

She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl.

Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base pa.s.sions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"

She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower towers, and as soon as she had pa.s.sed the first and could look along the hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl was standing on the very top of the gra.s.sy mound that supported the tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird, and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of pa.s.sion until the sun had fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that made her cry out with joy.

Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was sinister.

CHAPTER IV

It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue which the night a.s.sumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses in a bowl had the air of brooding and pa.s.sionate captives. Different from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of the wood fire danced again in the gla.s.s doors of one of the bookcases: and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep, stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker.

She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author whose work she studied. In the swinging gla.s.s door beside her there was a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and, orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard would find such an interior on his return.

"Have you found a book you like?"

"No. There's lots of lovely ones. But none I just fancy. I'm inclined to be disagreeable and far too particular this evening. Are these your books or Richard's?"

"Nearly all mine."

"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.

I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."

"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you awake."

"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all right as soon as Richard comes."

Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted intimacies and pa.s.sages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift dislike, had pa.s.sed in this room whose appearance she had been watching with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.

Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.

It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the evening in making Ellen like her.

"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.

"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."

But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She pa.s.sed into the room of bright new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."

"Let me brush your hair."

As she took out the coa.r.s.e black pins, her heart rejoiced because Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to be understood and conciliated. Her wish that it were so reminded her how much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl's shoulder at her reflection in the gla.s.s. "It is a face that believes there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out," she thought. "Well, that is probably true for her. I, with my foes who are a part of myself, am unusually cursed. If these young people have ordinary luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy standing by and watching them. Oh, I must make friends with her. We have many things in common. I will talk to her about the Suffragettes. What shall I say about them? I do honestly think that they are splendid women. I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out into the streets knowing they will be stoned...." A memory overcame her.

"Ah!" she cried out, and laid down the brush.

"What's the matter?" exclaimed Ellen, standing up. There was a certain desperation in her tone, as if she thought the tragic life of a household ought to have a definite closing-time every night, after which people could go to bed in peace.

"I forgot--I forgot to take some medicine. I must go and take it now.

And I don't think I'd better come back. I'm sure you'll brush your hair better yourself. I'm sure I tugged. You're so tired, you ought to go to bed at once. Good-night. Good-night." By the slow shutting of the door she tried to correct the queer impression of her sudden flight, but knew as she did so that it sounded merely furtive.

In her own room she undressed with frantic haste so that she could turn out the light and retreat into the darkness as into a burrow. But everywhere in the blackness, even on the inside of the sheet she drew over her face as she lay in bed, were pictures of the aspects of evil the world had turned to her that day: thirty years before, when she was stoned down the High Street of Roothing. She was in the grip of one of her recurrent madnesses of memory. There was no Richard to sit by her side and comfort her, not by what he said, for she had kept so much from him that he could say nothing that was really relevant, but by his beauty and his dearness, which convinced her that all was well since she had given birth to him; so her agony must go on until the dawn.

She must get used to that, because when he was married to Ellen she would no longer be able to sit up in her bed and call "Richard, Richard!" and strike the bell that rang in his room--that rang, as it seemed, in his mind, since no other sound but it ever wakened him in the night. Not again would he stand at the door, his dark hair damp and rumpled, his eyes blinking at the strong light, while his voice spoke hoa.r.s.ely out of undispersed sleep. "Mother, darling mother, are you having bad dreams?" Not again would she answer moaningly, "Oh, Richard, yes!" and tremble with delight in the midst of her agony to see how, when this big man was dazed and half awake, he held his arms upwards to her as if he were still a little boy and she a tall overshadowing presence. In the future he must be left undisturbed to sleep in Ellen's arms. That thought caused her inexplicable desolation. Rather than think it she gave up the struggle and allowed herself to be possessed by memory, and to smart again under the humiliation of that afternoon when life had made a fool of her. For what had hurt her most was that she had gone out into the world, the afternoon it stoned her, in a mood of the tenderest love towards it.

She had risen late, she remembered, that day. All night long she had been ill, and had not slept until the first wrangling of the birds. Then suddenly she had opened her eyes, and after remembering, as she always did when she woke, that she was going to have a child, she had looked out of her wide window into the mature and undoubtful sunshine of a fine afternoon. She had felt wonderfully well and terribly hungry, and had hastened at her washing and dressing so that she could run downstairs and get something to eat. When she went into the kitchen she saw that dinner was over, for the plates were drying in the rack and Peggy, the maid, was not there. It was incredible that she had not known why Peggy had gone out, that she should fatuously have told herself that the girl was probably working in the dairy; but in those days her mind was often half asleep with love for the unborn.

She rejoiced that she had missed the family meal, for it was not easy to sit at the table with Grandmother and Cousin Tom and Aunt Alphonsine, unspoken comments on her position hanging from each face like stalact.i.tes. In the larder she found the cold roast beef, magnificently marbled with veins of fat, and the cherry pie, with its globes of imperial purple and its dark juice streaked on the surface with richness exuded from the broken vault-of the pastry, and she ate largely, with the solemn greed of pregnancy. Afterwards she washed the dishes, in that state of bland, featureless contentment that comes to one whose being knows that it is perfectly fulfilling its function and that it is earning its keep in the universe without having to attempt any performance on that vexing instrument, the mind.

When she had finished, she wandered out of the kitchen aimlessly, benevolently wishing that her baby was born so that she could spend the afternoon playing with it.

The parlour door was ajar, and she peeped in and saw Grandmother sitting asleep in the high-backed chair, a shaft of sunlight blessing her bent head to silver and stretching a corridor for dancing motes to the bowl of mignonette. She saw the scene with the eye of an oleographer. In defiance of experience she considered her grandmother as a dear old lady, and the hum of a bee circling about the mignonette sounded like the peace that was in the room becoming articulate and praising G.o.d.

Enjoyable tears stood in her eyes. Drying them and looking round the dear scene, so that she might remember it, she saw that the grandfather clock marked it as half-past two. Now was the time that she must go for her walk. The children would be back at school, the men would be at work, and the women still busy cleaning up after their midday meal. She was afraid now to walk on the Yaverland lands for fear of finding Goodtart, the cattleman, standing quite still in some shadowed place where she would not see him till it was too late to avoid touching him as she pa.s.sed, and turning on her those dung-brown eyes in which thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a ca.n.a.l; and though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the belvedere. The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go so far. But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran from the glebe land opposite Yaverland's End and stretched towards the village High Street. No one ever went there at this time of day.

Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown. Stealing out very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and rea.s.surance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married, and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the n.o.ble aspirant oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by some wise, far-sighted person.

It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had slept so badly in the thirty years that had pa.s.sed since that afternoon, to remember how she had walked in those woods in a pa.s.sion of good-will to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before the child was born and would cloak her in protective pa.s.sion, and his pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.

It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circ.u.mstances these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that, and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive eyes. She knew that he would be pa.s.sionate and intractable and yet held to n.o.bility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that, for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.

At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly, swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously for an excuse to talk of s.e.xual things that they might let loose the unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds, and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young doctor who had been _loc.u.m tenens_ here in February, and that they had seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family, and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.

She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.

The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly, the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.

Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that his great h.o.r.n.y fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of another expulsion. "Oh, ter dash with the thing!" he exclaimed mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue sky above and snuffled. Marion's heart dissolved. She could not let this poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.

"George!" she called softly, staying among the branches. He gaped about him. "George!" she called a little louder. "The ball's in the pit, among the leaves." But he was transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to gape. She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after only half a moment's reluctance she stepped forward. She did not really mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby. For there was now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been before and her body was like a vase. It was only when they had awful thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn. So she went over to him, pointing to the pit. "I saw it roll down there, George.

Look! There it is."