because her mother deemed her father a very wise man, whereas she, Audrey,
knew that he was nothing of the sort. She felt sorry for both of them. She
pitied her father, and she was a mother to her mother. Their relations
together, and the mystic posthumous spell of her father over her mother,
impressed her profoundly.... And she was proud of herself for having
demonstrated her courage by preventing the solicitor from running away, and
extraordinarily ashamed of her sentimental and brazen behaviour to the
solicitor afterwards. These various thoughts mitigated her despair as she
gazed at the sinking candle. Nevertheless her dream was annihilated.



CHAPTER VI

THE YOUNG WIDOW


It was early October. Audrey stood at the garden door of Flank Hall.

The estuary, in all the colours of unsettled, mild, bright weather, lay at
her feet beneath a high arch of changing blue and white. The capricious
wind moved in her hair, moved in the rich grasses of the sea-wall, bent at
a curtseying angle the red-sailed barges, put caps on the waves in the
middle distance, and drew out into long horizontal scarves the smoke of
faint steamers in the offing.

Audrey was dressed in black, but her raiment had obviously not been
fashioned in the village, nor even at Colchester, nor yet at Ipswich, that
great and stylish city. She looked older; she certainly had acquired
something of an air of knowledge, assurance, domination, sauciness and