my husband and
I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as
the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot
of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he
was taken ill."

He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."

"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his
age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I
knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New
Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of
the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed
by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There
was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and
disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back
of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave
birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was
disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her
protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very
meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had
been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she
was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody
would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.
Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional
people who are old or not perfectly happy.

"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he
knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naive and
touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as
he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now
that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming
into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.

"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex
for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that
most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent
people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother
was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"

It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on
a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, th