How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to pay any real price! She looked back through the past at Peacey's conduct of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at some perfect and obscene work of art. He had laid his hand so wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and, knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship, she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had failed utterly.
Mrs. Cliffe had come in with a cup of tea and some cake on a tray. "You'll feel better for this," she said, and while Marion had ate and drunk she had stood by the window and looked at her. It seemed to Marion that she had greatly changed of late. Before, she had belonged very definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative of a change from her pristine gentility.
"Funny I never heard of you being like this," she said at last.
"It is. I thought everyone was talking about it."
"They may be. But there's times when one doesn't listen to what people are saying." For a time she was silent. "Ah, well," she meditated bitterly, "it doesn't pay to do wrong, does it?"
"I haven't done wrong," said Marion.
"So you say now," Mrs. Cliffe told her, "but there'll come a day when you see you have." She drew in her breath with a little gasp as Peacey put his head in at the door.
He looked sharply from one to the other, and then advanced to Marion's couch, rubbing his hands genially. "Now then, Trixy," he said teasingly, "you don't want me to talk too long to your beloved husband, do you? I might go telling him things about you, mightn't I? You run along and look after him." Mrs. Cliffe retired quite taciturnly, nothing in her face responding to this rallying, and he bent quickly over Marion. "I hope she hasn't been worrying you?" he asked. Concern for her?—it sounded just like concern for her—made his voice tremble. "That's why I hurried back. Women are so narrow-minded to their poor sisters who haven't been so fortunate. I thought she might have been making you feel a bit uncomfortable."
"Oh no," said Marion.
The mask of his poor ugly face, which had been grotesque with pitying lines, became smooth. He sighed with relief, and sat down by her side, very humbly.