wedges which might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the dea ex machinâ of the calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.
She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.
"Where have you been?" she asked indifferently, for there was always a curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
"Catching frogs to dissect," said Thérèse. "They're damned scarce and I slipped into the river."
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse's life so that no one could ever hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine's curious sense
