‘We can’t stand staring here all night,’ Abner was saying. She was aware of him standing beside her in the dusk, holding Gladys to his breast. She saw the child’s white hands clasped about his neck, as quietly as if she were asleep. She heard him, but could not stir. Then Abner touched her upper arm, and the pressure of his fingers went through her body like fire along a fuse exploding some mine of passion that had lain hidden beneath her long silence. It burned her like flame, burned her and rent her. . . . She trembled and turned on him violently. Words of abuse came tumbling out of her mouth. She did not know or care what she was saying. She lashed him, wildly, desperately. It was he who was to blame for all this trouble, he who had persuaded her to take the children to Bron and allowed her to be insulted in the inn at Redlake; he who had entangled them in the crowd where Gladys’s leg was broken; and now he’d lost them, and brought them to a place where they might all die of cold with his damned foolishness. Some devil inside her brain drove her on, delighting in the vile things she said, raking up little grudges of the past and throwing them in his face, revealing, against her will, such petty miseries as her jealousy of Susie Hind. ‘It’s with her you ought to be,’ she cried, ‘instead of troubling us! That’s where you ought to be! You’d better go on and leave us, Gladys and Morgan and me. You don’t know any more than I do where we are, with the night coming on. We can’t go a step farther, neither me nor Morgan, poor little thing! Oh, go! Go! I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you!’ She threw herself down, exhausted, on the wet grass. He had stood up to it utterly bewildered. He couldn’t protest, for all her ravings were so childish, so disconnected, so passionately illogical. He simply let her go on until she had finished with him. Then he disengaged Gladys’s arms from his neck and laid her down gently. ‘You’re just about done in,’ he said. ‘It’s natural.’ Again he placed his hand on Mary’s arm, hoping to soothe her and to persuade. She gave a strange shudder, as though his fingers had been ice, and burst into tears, covering her face with her hands. He comforted her clumsily, talking to her as he would have done to a child, until she no longer shrank from him, being too weak to care. Then she took hold of his coat and clung to him, still sobbing her heart away. She was broken . . . quite broken.