A scornful little smile curled Martin's lip. So that was it! But the smile soon died away. One did not hit what was already down! Thyme's voice wailed through the silence. “I thought I could--but I want beautiful things. I can't bear it all so grey and horrible. I'm not like that girl. I'm-an-amateur!” 'If I kissed her---' Martin thought. She sank down again, burying her face in the dark beech-mat. The moonlight had passed on. Her voice came faint and stiffed, as out of the tomb of faith. “I'm no good. I never shall be. I'm as bad as mother!” But to Martin there was only the scent of her hair. “No,” murmured Thyme's voice, “I'm only fit for miserable Art.... I'm only fit for--nothing!” They were so close together on the dark beech mat that their bodies touched, and a longing to clasp her in his arms came over him. “I'm a selfish beast!” moaned the smothered voice. “I don't really care for all these people--I only care because they're ugly for me to see!” Martin reached his hand out to her hair. 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. Since the evening when she had found Thyme in foods of tears because of the Hughs' baby, her maternal eyes had not failed to notice something new in the child's demeanour--a moodiness, an air almost of conspiracy, together with an emphatic increase of youthful sarcasm: Fearful of probing deep, she had sought no confidence, nor had she divulged her doubts to Stephen.