formed with the extremest publicity before a crowd of issues, if
not of persons. It was to be a subordinate episode in a pageant the plot
of which she did not know.

Marion, watching her face, saw the faint twitches of resentment playing
about her mouth and felt some remorse. "She would be so happy just being
Richard's sweetheart, if I did not interfere," she thought. "Ah, how the
old tyrannise over the young...." And there came on her a sudden chill
as she remembered of what character that tyranny could be. She
remembered one day, when she was nineteen, waking from sleep to find old
people round her. She had been having such a lovely dream. On her
lover's arm, she had been walking across the fields in innocent sunshiny
weather, and he had been laughing and full of a far greater joy in
impersonal things than she had ever known him. When he saw gorse in life
he would repeat the country catch, "When the gorse is out of bloom then
kissing's out of fashion," but in her dream he laughed to see fire and
water meet where the gorse grew on the sheep-pond's broken lip. He had
liked the white cloths bleaching on the grass, and the song the lark in
the sky twirled like a lad throwing and catching a coin, and the spinney
on the field's slope's heights, where the tide of spring broke in a
green surf of budding undergrowth at the feet of black bare trees.

During all the months her child was moving in her body she was visited
by dreams of spring. This was the best of dreams: it was real. The
lark's song and Harry's happy laughter were loud in her ears; and she
rolled over in her bed and opened her eyes on Grandmother and Aunt
Alphonsine. She looked away from them, but saw only things that reminded
her how ill she was; the tumbler of milk she had not been able to drink,
set in a circle of its own wetness on a plate among fingers of
bread-and-butter left from the morning; they had been told to tempt her
appetite, but they were betraying that they felt she had had more than
enough temptation lately; the bottles of medicine ranged along the
mantelpiece, high-shouldered like the facades of chapels and pasted with
labels that one desired to read as little as chapel notice-boards, and
with contents just as ineffectual at their business of establishing the
right; the jug filled with a bunch of flowers left by some kindly
neighbour who did not know what was the matter with her.

That raised difficult issues. She turned her eyes back to the o