“Go to your rooms, my daughters! Sister Marie!”
The young nun came forward; tears were in her eyes.
“Sister Marie, pray that the sins of that poor soul be forgiven. But, yes, my child, it is sad. Go to your room, and pray!”
With what grace the child walked! She, too, had the limbs of beauty, and the Mother Superior sighed....
Morning, cold and grey, a sprinkle of snow on the ground. They came for the dancer during Mass. Later a sound of firing! With trembling lips the Mother Superior prayed for the soul dancing before her God....
That evening they searched for Sister Marie, and could not find her. After two days a letter came.
“Forgive me, my Mother. I have gone back to life.
Life out of death! The Mother Superior sat quite still. Figures from the past were stealing out again; and the dancer’s face with the red flower in her hair, the dark sweetened eyes, the lips, touched with a flying finger, parted in a kiss!
Mist enwrapped Restington-on-Sea; not very thick, but exceedingly clammy. It decked the autumn trees in weirdness, cobwebbed the tamarisks, and compelled Henry Ivor to shut his window, excluding the faint hiss and rustle from the beach. He seldom wrote after tea without the accompaniment of fresh air, and was drowsing over his pen when his housekeeper entered.
“A couple to see you, sir; they came once before, when you was away.”
When the door was again opened a scent of whisky came in first, then a man, a woman, and a dog.
Ivor laid down his pen, and rose; he had never seen any of them before, and immediately doubted whether he wanted to see any of them again. Never able, however, to be disagreeable at a moment’s notice, he waited defensively. The man, who might have been thirty-five, pale, warped, and thin, seemed to extract his face from the grip of nerves.
“Hearing you were down here, sir, and being in the printing trade, if you understand my meaning----”
Ivor nodded; he did not want to nod, but it seemed unavoidable; and he looked at the woman. Her face was buttoned, the most expressionless he had ever seen.
The man’s lips, thin and down at one corner, writhed again.
“You being a well-known writer,” he said, and the scent of whisky deepened.
Ivor thought: ‘It wants courage to beg; it’s damp too. Perhaps he’s only primed himself.’