Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last
his lips. Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.

"GO," she would say.

That was the end.

It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
fairyland to this grey world again.



3


The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that
William Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. The
second Mrs. Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome
ability about her fitted her far more than her predecessor for the
onerous duties of a schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural
buoyancy she possessed was outweighed by an irrepressible conviction
derived from an episcopal grandparent that the remarriage of
divorced persons is sinful, and by a secret but well-founded doubt
whether her husband loved her with a truly romantic passion. She
might perhaps have borne either of these troubles singly, but the
two crushed her spirit.