She was irritated because he would not forgive her, but she went to him and laid her head against his coat. A tremor shot through him when she touched him and she did not know whether she was agitating him in a manner complimentary to herself or not. But something in her hardened. He had no right to conceal himself. "Oh, Laurie!" They were still against each other. She felt him waiting for her to lift her head. When people married they became one. She was conscious of feeling cruel, but it seemed to her that she had nothing to reproach herself with. "I cut myself on my manicure scissors today. You mustn't be stern with me." He could not help thinking what a common deceitful-looking little hand she had. He was sorry for her. "What a tragedy!" His lips rested on the finger an instant without giving themselves. They quivered a little. An emotion that was unpleasant and at the same time exhilarating swept through her and seemed to lift her from her feet. She thought sadly and complacently of how much she had suffered for him already. "Where is May?" Laurence asked suddenly. He felt that in kissing Winnie's finger he had committed himself to some unknown almost sinister thing. He resented the stupidity of his thought. "Downstairs, I suppose." When he talked of May, Winnie was glad to leave him. She felt as if he were lying to her. Laurence moved toward the door, his gross body large in the darkening room. Winnie seemed to know each detail of him as he passed into the dark hall. It was painful to know him so distinctly. She tried in vain to revive the blurred apperception of him which she had had in earlier days. She wanted people to see him as she had seen him then. His rocking walk humiliated her and when visitors were present she tried to inveigle him into sitting in an armchair where his heavy handsome profile would be silhouetted against the light, his awkward body at rest. I don't think it is right for him to show an exaggerated preference for one child, she told herself. He doesn't love May! He exaggerates his feeling for her out of pique. Winnie could not forgive him for being kinder to May than she was. She found a match. Among the shadows the invisible sun made patches of bronze light. In the dark the match flared like a long soft wound of flame. The gas rushed out of the jet with a thick hiss and the flame spread into a fan. It was a wing covered with yellow down, blue at the quill. The wind sucked at it soundlessly. She walked to the window which the gas flame had already made dark. The sky was green-blue. Bunches of black leaves on the trees in the square cut the dim fiery horizon into twinkling segments. A telegraph pole rose up like a finger higher than the houses and appeared to lean heavily against the quiet beyond. Behind flecks of cloud putrescent stars shone as through flecks of foam on an enchanted sea.