pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.

She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She was
beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed so far
away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking
heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the
breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.

"What have I to do with it?" she said to herself. "What have I to do
with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn't seem as if
I were taken into account."

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes
one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were
slurred over.

"I wait," Mrs. Morel said to herself--"I wait, and what I wait for can
never come."

Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked
out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After which
she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle flashed
regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to relieve
herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most of what
she had, for the children's sakes.

At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and
very shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was
pleased with himself.