The dawning relief in his face was too much for her. She knelt down on the carpet beside him and kissed his head.
‘Oh, dad, you’re too killing!’ she said. ‘Do you think I can’t look after myself?’
‘Well, thank Heaven for that!’ was all he could say.
They talked the matter out more soberly that evening over the embers of the fire when Ethel had been sent off to bed. They were as happy in each other’s company and as tender as lovers who have quarrelled and made it up again. The moment of vision had faded for ever. The room in which they sat had regained its old familiarity in Marion’s eyes, forcing itself to be accepted as her home; Mr Prosser was no longer a coarse, fair-whiskered man with more than a drop of whisky in him, but the father whom she had always known; the sombre life of The Dyke, with its slow, rich comfort, was the life to which she had been born. And she considered what would be the effect on that life of her marrying Abner Fellows, for if her father’s suspicions had been justified there was no doubt but that he would have compelled the lover to make an honest woman of her. No happiness worth the daring lay in that direction. She knew that she could hope for nothing but a continual clashing of the two men’s wills and herself a buffer between them. Her father had a long memory for his hates. There could never be any peace in the house till he died. Rather than submit to such a humiliation she would cut herself free from The Dyke and share Abner’s life. Love in a cottage with a vengeance! But did he love her? She had no real reason to believe it. And did she love him? She could not say. Better, far better, cling to the certainties, whatever they might be.
‘We’ll say no more about it,’ said Mr Prosser. ‘Let bygones be bygones, eh?’
She nodded her head slowly at the fire. A piece of the shattered decanter that had escaped her brush suddenly caught a gleam of light. It meant no more to her now than a flake of the stone-men’s flint of the kind that she and Ethel found on their picnics at Castel Ditches.
‘Of course Fellows must go,’ said Mr Prosser. ‘I reckon I can find another man by the end of the week.’
‘Yes,’ Marion murmured. ‘At the end of the week.’
‘Luckily there’s no scarcity of labour,’ said Mr Prosser happily.
Marion’s thoughts turned idly to Wolfpits. She shut the idea of Wolfpits out of her mind. It was wrong, she thought, that Mary Malpas should ever have come again into her life. It was always wrong to uncover the past. They sat for a long time in silence. She crouched on the floor at her father’s side and his arm was thrown carelessly over her shoulder. His head nodded and he fell asleep, but Marion still stared into the embers, seeing nothing. It was nearly midnight when Mr Prosser woke with a start and rubbed his eyes.