IV.
The big pink roses of the chintzes and the gold bordered bowls of the black mirrors looked at you rememberingly.
There was a sort of brutality about it. To come here and be happy, to come here in order to be happy, when they were gone; when you had hurt them both so horribly.
"I'm sitting in her chair," she thought.
Richard Nicholson sat, in a purely temporary attitude, by the table in the window. Against the window-pane she could see his side face drawn in a brilliant, furred line of light. His moustache twitched under the shadow of his nose. He was smiling to himself as he wrote the letter to Mamma.
There was a brutality about that, too. She wondered if he had seen old Baxter's pinched mouth and sliding eyes when he took the letter. He was watching him as he went out, waiting for the click of the latch.
"It's all right," he said. "They expect you. They think it's work."
He settled himself (in Mr. Sutcliffe's chair).
"It's the best way," he said. "I want to see you and I don't want to frighten your mother. She is afraid of me."
"No. She's afraid of the whole thing. She wishes it hadn't happened. She's afraid of what'll happen next. I can't make her see that nothing need happen next."