Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers; but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer, closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye first saw.
"'Lamport and Holt. Bruyère, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for Rosario. Lalande, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande. Leighton, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. Vestris, left Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to Pernambuco?"
"Once," he said.
"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.
"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."
"Like Venice? Why?"
"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."
She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the silence settle.
After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"
She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out," she said timorously.