“I’ve always minded it,” Mattie said. “First time I set eyes on it,--ay, and long before that. But I wouldn’t let on about it even to myself. I made out it wouldn’t matter, just as I made out other things wouldn’t matter. But I was only cheating myself all the time. They _do_ matter, and I do mind; and now I’m old I haven’t the courage to face ’em.” “You’ll face ’em right enough to-morrow,--see if you won’t! You’re over-tired to-night. I’ll be bound you weren’t bothering about the sea when you woke this morning!” He spoke purposely in a light, bantering tone, hoping to stir her out of her trouble; but she shook her head. “There’ll be another night to-morrow.... It’s the nights you’ve got to think of, when you’re getting old. And it isn’t only the sea. There’s other things as well.” “Tell me the other things, Mattie.” She shook her head again, but almost at once she was launched upon her tale, as if the little movement had flung her into the tideway. As well as she could she described to him her reactions during the day, beginning with the little cloud which had shadowed even the dream itself, and which had grown to such proportions by the evening. Her talk halted and turned upon itself and wandered to and fro, until not only the tale but the hours themselves seemed twisted into a tangle. Something, however, of the actual state of things emerged finally from the muddle, together with a fairly definite indication of how it had come about. She told him, still shielded by her hands, how the house and the garden had caught at her unawares, rising up against her with armed memories which she had not known to possess the power to wound her. She told him of Dick’s grumbled warnings, of her passion for the privet hedge, of the jealousy and injured pride with which she had found herself facing Mrs. Machell. She told him at great length of the underminings of Cousin Jessie. And at the last, sighing and half-sobbing, she told him of the betrayal of the children, and the greater treachery of Ellen. “That’s what’s getting at me most,” she finished, hating her own voice as she heard it quiver. “That’s what’s done me down. T’other things was bad enough, of course, fretting me right and left till I was near frantic. But I’d have got over ’em, likely, after a bit, and when I was feeling better. Likely I would, that is. I’m not so sure.... But what beats me is the children going back on us and thinking we wouldn’t come. Folks as stop believing in a thing like as not stop wanting it,--that’s how it seems to me.”