If she had shrunk away he would
have seized her, but as though by instinct she let it rest there. And at
her sudden stillness, strange and touching, Martin's quick passion left
him. He slipped his arm round her and raised her up, as if she had been
a child, and for a long time sat listening with a queer twisted smile to
the moanings of her lost illusions.
The dawn found them still sitting there against the bole of the
beech-tree. Her lips were parted; the tears had dried on her sleeping
face, pillowed against his shoulder, while he still watched her sideways
with the ghost of that twisted smile.
And beyond the grey water, like some tired wanton, the moon in an orange
hood was stealing down to her rest between the trees.
CHAPTER XXXVI
STEPHEN SIGNS CHEQUES
Cecilia received the mystic document containing these words "Am quite
all right. Address, 598, Euston Road, three doors off Martin. Letter
follows explaining. Thyme," she had not even realised her little
daughter's departure. She went up to Thyme's room at once, and opening
all the drawers and cupboards, stared into them one by one. The many
things she saw there allayed the first pangs of her disquiet.
'She has only taken one little trunk,' she thought, 'and left all her
evening frocks.'
This act of independence alarmed rather than surprised her, such had
been her sense of the unrest in the domestic atmosphere during the last
month.
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