She could never leave
them for a minute when her sister came. Unless Steven happened to be
in. Then Mary would abandon whatever she was doing and hurry to the
two. In the last year Gwenda had never found herself alone with Steven
for ten minutes in his house. If Mary couldn't come at once she sent
the nurse in with the children.
Upstairs in the night nursery Mary sat in the nurse's low chair.
Her year-old baby sprawled naked in her lap. The elder infant stood
whining under the nurse's hands.
Mary had changed a little in three and a half years. She was broader
and stouter; the tender rose had hardened over her high cheek bones.
Her face still kept its tranquil brooding, but her slow gray eyes had
a secret tremor, they were almost alert, as if she were on the watch.
And Mary's mouth, with its wide, turned back lips, had lost its
subtlety, it had coarsened slightly and loosened, under her senses'
continual content.
Gwenda brushed Mary's mouth lightly with the winged arch of her upper
lip. Mary laughed.
"You don't know how to kiss," she said. "If you're going to treat Baby
that way, and Molly too--"
Gwenda stooped over the soft red down of the baby's head. To Gwenda it
was as if her heart kept her hands off Rowcliffe's children, as if
her flesh shrank from their flesh while her lips brushed theirs in
tenderness and repulsion.
But seeing them was always worse in anticipation than reality.
For there was no trace of Rowcliffe in his children.
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