e-pudding; her heart beat
fast in her breast when she thought of the brown crinkly skin of the
rich warm milk of a true rice-pudding; also she loved hot buttered
toast, very buttery so that it soaked your fingers; also beef-steak
pudding with gravy rich and dark and its white covering thick and
heavy; she also loved hot and sweet tea and the little cakes that Amy
sometimes bought, red and yellow and pink, held in white paper--also
plum-pudding, which, alas! only came at Christmastime and wedding-cake,
which scarcely ever came at all.

This vice, of which she was almost triumphantly conscious as though it
were a proof of her enduring vitality, she clutched eagerly to herself.
She did not wish that any human being should perceive it. Of her
husband she was not afraid--it would never possibly occur to him that
food was of importance to any one; Amy might discover what she pleased,
she was in strong alliance with her mother and would never betray her.

Her fear was of Martin. She feared very deeply his influence upon her
husband. During Martin's absence she and Amy had managed very
successfully to have the house as they wished it; John Warlock, the
master, had been too deeply occupied with the affairs of the soul to be
concerned also with the affairs of the body.

She had, she believed, exercised an increasing influence over him. She
had always loved him with a fierce and selfish love, but now, when he
was nearly seventy, and to both of them only a few years of earthly
ambition could remain, she desired, with all the urgent ferocity of a
human being through whose fingers the last sands of his opportunity are
slipping, to seize and hold and have him entirely hers. He had always
eluded her; although he had once certainly loved her with, at any rate,
a semblance of earthly passion, his spiritual life had always come
between them, holding him from her, helping him to escape when he
pleased, tantalising, sometimes maddening too. She was certainly now
not so ready to dismiss that spiritual life as once she had been. She
was herself an old heathen; for herself she believed in nothing but her
earthly appetites and desires, but for him and for others there might
be something in it, ... and perhaps some day some dreadful thing would
occur ... a chariot of Fire descend upon the Chapel and some sort of a
fierce and hostile God deliver judgment; she only hoped that she would
be dead before then.

Meanwhile she and Amy had, undoubted