round the crouching room with its smoky ceiling, then through the window at the void skyline. ‘Antonia, you and he can’t mean here?
‘Where else?’
‘But this is a dreadful house.’
‘It was Guy’s. He loved it.’
‘He seldom spoke of it.’
‘Seldom to you, perhaps.’
‘I could never care for a place I could not keep nice.’
‘Once you’re married, you’ll find you’ll be twice the girl!’
An authentic shudder ran through Lilia’s frame. ‘I could never, now, embark upon all that !’
‘Rats! Try.’
‘Oh, you are sometimes terrible!’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Antonia. ‘Think it over—only don’t shillyshally; it wouldn’t be fair to Fred. By all means go back to the tea shop if you’d rather; but if you do, this time you must stick it out—or find something else for yourself. I shan’t be able to prop you up any longer: the point has come when I won’t, so you’ll have to face it. I’m sick of having Montefort run to ruin; I’m going into this partnership with Fred; we’ll need all I have to patch up and stock the place. So you, I’m afraid, must be left to your own resources—which of course may be endless, for all I know!’
‘For all you care,’ Lilia said in a dead voice.
She had remained for three days stunned by the ultimatum, shocked by the outrage, mindless with indecision; while Fred, appearing only at meals, stole at her glances in which respect, pity and increasing desire were to be felt to merge. Aware of, slowly worked upon by those glances, she still refused to address Fred or meet his eyes. At last she capitulated; and, as Antonia could not now wait to be off to London, the wedding went through almost at once. Having escorted the couple home from the church, Antonia leaped back into the beribboned hackney and made her habitual dash to the boat train. She looked behind her once—they still stood framed in the doorway, blankly watching her go. They put no face on the thing.
It is not known what words Fred and Lilia then or in the following time exchanged. Left there to mate, they mated; but that is never all. Unleashed by marriage, his unforseen passion for her ran its unspeaking course, just outlasting the birth of their first child Jane. Antonia, returning to Montefort into the thick of that, was aghast. Though after all, she said to herself, why not? All the same, something monstrous seemed to her to be under her own roof. These two engendered a climate; the air around them felt to her sultry, overintensified, strange; one could barely breathe it. Yes, they had passed beyond her—she had made the match, they the marriage. For Lilia that was an epoch, not to occur again, of ascendancy over her former patron. She was again in beauty, of a lofty late lightless inert kind; her pregnancy added to and became her, and this great never quite smiling snow-woman, come into being almost overnight, was formidable. She neutrally and abstractedly eyed Antonia, heard her speak or spoke to her from a distance—she was queening it, and, which was still worse, queening it naturally, unawares. Smug, thought Antonia, cutting that visit short.
That, however, had been twenty years ago. When next Antonia came to Montefort Jane was an infant, and Fred’s kind, unfailing patience with Lilia confirmed the rumours that he was off again, back to his loves in the lanes. It was when Jane took form as herself that her father entered upon his first and last, devouring, hopeless and only love.
Fred had not, in reality, this June morning, more than once asked where Jane was—upon there seeming to be no answer, he had turned and gone out without a word more. Now, an hour later, he had looked again: here he was, standing in the kitchen, hastily drinking out of a thick Delft cup. Lilia, coming down from Antonia’s room, found him with Kathie the little servant at his elbow, waiting to spoon more sugar in to the tea when he should pause. Fred’s shirt was open, showing