She smiled softly as she went about the room, putting the touches of perfection to the festival. There were roses everywhere; on the table, on the mantelpiece; the room was sweet with the smell of them; there was a rose on each child's plate. The tremulous movements of her hands betrayed the immensity and the desperation of her passion to please. The very waiter was touched by her, and smiled secretly in sympathy as he saw her laying her pretty lures. When he had gone she arranged the table all over again and did it better. Then she stood looking at it, hovering round it, thinking. She would sit here, and the children there, Janet between her and Robert, Barbara between her and Jane. "Poor little things," she said, "poor little things." She yearned to them even in her fear of them, and when she thought of them sitting there her lips moved in unspoken, pitiful endearments. The light from the south-west streamed into the little room and made it golden. Everything in it shimmered and shone. The window, flung wide open to the veranda, framed the green lawn and the shining, shimmering sea. A wind, small and soft, stirred the thin curtains to and fro, fanning the warm air. The sunlight and heat oppressed her. She shut her eyes and put her hands over them to cool them with darkness. It was a trick she had when she was troubled. She sat by the window and waited in the strange, throbbing darkness of hot eyes closed in daylight, a darkness smitten by the sun and shot with a fiery fume. They were coming now. She heard feet on the gravel outside, round the corner; she heard Robert's voice and Janey's; and then little shuffling footsteps at the door, and two voices shrill and sweet. Robert came in first and the children with him. They stood all three on the threshold, looking at her. Robert was smiling, but the little girls (they were very little) were grave. His eyes drew her and she came toward them as she was used to come to the things of her desire, swift and shy, with a trailing, troubling movement; the way that he had seen her come, swayed by the rhythm of impulse. The children stood stock still as she stooped to them. Her fear of them made her supremely gentle. Little Barbara put up her round rose face with its soft mouth thrust forward in a premature kiss. Janet gave her a tiny hand and gazed at her with brooding, irresponsive eyes. Her little mouth never moved as Kitty's mouth touched it. But little Barbara held out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see. "Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a divine superfluity of joy. Robert stood looking down from his tremendous height at Barbara, tenderly as one who contemplates a thing at once heartrending and absurd. Then his eyes turned to Kitty, smiling quietly as if they said, "Didn't I tell you to wait until you'd seen them?" Kitty's heart contracted with a sharp, abominable pang.