She sat down and wondered if she cared. She certainly cared about the child’s welfare, but now that she felt it was impossible to prevent what was happening, she could reason about it calmly. Life was a dreadfully sad thing any way you took it. But could this love affair do the girl more harm than she was sure to meet with in any event--perhaps at the hands of worse men? Might it not come to mean something to her she would cherish despite its cost? Ellen’s only answer to these questions was her own experience. Perhaps it had been worth while. Her daughter was happy, with an unclouded future, and she was contented. Knowledge of herself had suddenly shaken her faith in the creed that one must inevitably suffer pain because of sin. XIII From the house far above them came the indistinct sound of Mathilda at the piano. Was it “_Reflets dans l’eau_” she was playing? As the music stopped the chaotic noises of life took up their endless staccato rhythm--cows lowing in the pasture, a workman calling to another, the beat of a hammer in some farmhouse, the restless twitter and trilling of birds, the snapping and stirring of branches, a motorhorn sounding a thousand miles away, it seemed--the music of the universe that was flowing through her now in a full stream. Moira opened her book at random: “Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see; Let the dew-fall drench either side of me; Clear apple leaves are soft upon that moon Seen side-wise like a blossom in the tree; Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon....” She stopped and looked off through the leaves to the wide fields where the sun lay. “Don’t you love it, Hal,” she said, “just the sound of it, the perverse beauty of it? Is there anything more wonderful?” Hal rolled over upon the flat of his back staring thoughtfully up from the shady chamber of green, the tiny grotto at the cliff-foot, up at the grey old overhanging boulders, like moles and maculations on the brow of an ancient crone, the massy tangle of branches and leaves bursting from among them and cutting off half his vision of the glittering blue heaven, wherein floated great flocks of clouds as artificial in their sheer whiteness and hard outlines as puff-balls on a pool. His muscular brown arms and neck were bare to the white bathing shirt. His bright blonde hair was tousled over his face, which was mature and strong. The girl’s voice made little ripples of pleasure run over his limbs; it gave the words a significance which would never have reached him without her-- “The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie, Kissed upon either cheek and either eye. I turn to thee as some green afternoon Turns toward sunset and is loth to die; Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon.”