nother bark of exasperation, for it had cracked across and he had cut
his hand on the sharp edge of the china.

"Oh, damn! oh, damn! oh, damn!" he cried, in a voice that rage made
high-pitched and childish, sucking his finger in between the words.
"What a filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two
halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of
distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered
uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a
desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the
maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards
the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved
it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round
till I've found that fool and that woman! This is some new
folly--probably I'll have to get him away before mother comes! Come on!
Perhaps they're hanging about the garden, though God knows why!" After
making a savage movement towards the broken vase, as if he could not
bear to leave the disorder as it was, and checking it abruptly,
jarringly, he rushed into the dining-room, and Ellen followed him.

The two were there, their faces pressed against the window-panes. Behind
them the grey waste of stormy shallow waters, and the salt-dimmed
pastures, and the black range of the Kentish hills, hung with
grape-purple rainclouds, made it apparent how much greater dignity
belongs to the earth and sea than to those who people them. As Richard
and Ellen halted at the door the faces receded from the glass. The woman
stepped backwards and, looking as if she were being moved on by a
policeman, passed suddenly out of sight beyond the window's edge.
Richard crossed the room and opened the French window, but by the time
he had unlocked it the man in uniform, who had been beckoning to his
companion with long bony hands, had gone in search of her. As Richard
put his head round the door to bid them enter, the wind, which was now
rushing round the house, made itself felt as a chill commotion, an icy
anger of the air, in which both he and Ellen shivered. Presently the
pair in uniform appeared again, but at some distance across the lawn,
and too intensely absorbed in argument to pay any attention to him.

"Oh, damn! oh, damn!" sobbed Richard. The wind was blowing earth-daubed
leaves off the flowerbeds through the open door into the prim room.