That raised difficult issues. She turned her eyes back to the old people. They looked terrible: Grandmother sitting among her spreading skirts, her face trembling with a weak forgiving sweetness, her hands clasped on her stick-handle with a strength which showed that if she was not allowed to forgive she would be merciless; Aunt Alphonsine, covering her bosom with those arms which looked so preternaturally and rapaciously long in the tight sleeves that Frenchwomen always love, and fingering now and then the scar that crossed her oval face as if it were an amulet the touch of which inspired her to be righteous and malign. Marion looked away from them again at the flowers, and tried to forget that they had been given by someone who would not have given them if she had known the truth, and to perceive simply that they were snapdragons, the velvet homes of elfs--reds and terra-cottas and yellows that even in sunlight had the melting mystery, the harmony with serious passion, that colours have commonly only in twilight.
But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared, and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow, "Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core of her soul a _dame de compagnie_; and Grandmother had said, with that use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."
That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been sacred to her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.