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"It would please me if you could force yourself to give her some sign of affection before you leave."

The young man again moved his head slowly, then nipped on his lower lip before he said, "I cannot pretend what I don't feel. I ... I am not made that way, and" --his look was direct now, his voice steady-"it is not my fault that I have a distaste for subterfuge."

Clive stared at his son. The irony of it, that he should have a distaste for subterfuge. He took after her in that way for she couldn't pretend either. The irony of it indeed.

When the door opened and she entered the room Clive turned to her and, his tone light now, he said, "I was just saying to Richard that this is the house in which he should have been brought up, and but for your unselfishness and thought for his future he would have been. Perhaps he would have profited more under your care."

She looked at her son fully now, and as if she were suddenly tired of keeping up a front, she dropped into the idiom of the family as she said, "His Lordship made a better job of you than I would have done; that's plain to be seen. I only had you for a very short time, just over five months. Apart from giving you birth, you belonged to him.

Even before you were born you were his, because he'd made up his mind to have you."

She was staring into her son's eyes when he stepped slowly forward and, taking her hand, bowed over it and said, "I thank you, Ma'am, for your courtesy and understanding."

To this she answered flatly, but with a break in her voice, "As long as you're happy that's all I ask, all I've ever asked." Then she withdrew her hand from his and turned gratefully to the door where Ellen was entering with the tray of coffee. Ten minutes later they were in the hall and she was bidding them good-bye; and when her son, again taking her hand, carried it to his lips, it meant nothing. The contact gave her no warmth, no thrill. For her the boy was back in the corner standing near the fireplace, in fact he had never left it, his hand out to her, his voice piping, "I don't like you."

She did not watch the carriage go down the drive, but running swiftly upstairs she threw herself on the bed and, burying her face in the pillow, wept until her body seemed awash with her tears. She wept until Mary and Ellen tapped on the door, then came into the room. She wept so that Ellen put her arms around her and rocked and patted her as if she were a child, saying, "There, Ma'am. There, Ma'am."

And it was many weeks later that she burst out laughing when she recalled, for no apparent reason, Ellen's voice saying as she soothed her, "To hell and damnation with all lordsl"

It was Jimmy's birthday, the first one she had missed seeing him, but she felt she couldn't drive all the way over to the mill. The weeping of the day before had drained her; moreover, her eyes were swollen and it would be evident to anyone who saw her that she had been crying, and for some long time.

The night before, the girls had been indignant that she had been brought to this state, yet they couldn't get anything out of her. It was Ellen and Mary who informed them that it had all happened after His Lordship had left, together with the young man. And this explanation told them all Cissie had withheld.

It being Saturday, and a busy day, Sarah still found time to send word to Jimmy that their Cissie wasn't well and if he had time that night would he look over and perhaps bring Joe and William with him. She wanted cheering up.

The girls didn't dose the shop until ten, yet it was nearly always eleven when they arrived home, and they came by hired coach on Friday and Saturday nights. But it was around eight o'clock, and the twilight deepening, when Cissie heard the coach on the drive and thought.

That's one of them. They had come back early because they were worried over her.

She rose from the couch opposite the glowing fire, for the nights were beginning to get chilly, and went slowly down the room and into the hall, there to see Mary admitting a visitor.

Clive came straight towards her, and he spoke immediately as if he had been running, not driven in a carriage.

"I'm late; I intended returning last evening but was prevented, and I have been very busy today seeing to various things. We're sailing on Monday late, midnight ... will we go in?" He motioned towards the drawing-room door, and, as if coming awake, she drew in a long breath, then turned about. Once inside the room he checked her walk and, taking her by the shoulders, stared into her face. His eyes, roaming over each feature, noted her puffed lids, her trembling lips. He said,

"You've been hurt yet again. Every time we meet I inflict pain on you."

She moved her head quickly 'in denial, then let it droop forward but made no answer.

"This time I want, I intend, to make up for all the pain, if that is possible.... Cecilia, look at me. Cecil- ia.... Will you marry me?"

Her head came upwards. Secretly, yet not so secretly, over the past few days she had hoped and prayed for him to say these very words while at the same time she knew the desire, and its result, were utterly preposterous. Now for a second she was completely overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of them, but only for a second before she thrust them from her and him too, as she said bitterly, "As a sort of compensation, to make up for his rejection of me?"

"Nol No!" He flung one arm wide.

"It was my intention to ask you from the first day I entered this house, but it goes back much, much further than that." His voice dropped now and he reached out and took her stiff hand.

"The motive behind buying this house for you was not purely altruistic, for I planned to visit you. I think I told you, didn't I, that when I returned from the voyages I would call. I also planned something else." He did not say truthfully, "To make you my mistress," for there are some truths better left unsaid, but added, "Even then I hoped to marry you."

And the greater part of this was true, for he had seen himself molding her, educating her, making her fit to be the wife of a Fischel, even a first-mate Fischel as he was then.

She forced herself now to voice another thought that had been in her mind over the past few days, a thought that had attacked her hopes with the cutting knife of reality. She said quietly, "I'd never be able to live up to your position. You'd become ashamed of me."

Now he came close to her and caused her whole body to quiver as he took her face tenderly between his hands.

"I'd like to gamble all I've got on the fact that I'll be the envy of every man who meets you."

Her lids drooped.

"I ... I can't talk properly."

"You talk from the heart always, and you use your words well. If your inflection troubles you I can guarantee that you'll lose it within three months. But it pleases me. Anyway, that is a trivial thing, of no importance. But there is a question of importance I would ask you."

He paused here before saying below his breath, "Have you entirely forgiven me for the wrong I did you?"

She could smile now gently at him, and, her voice soft, she said, "It's strange, but from the moment I held him in my arms I never looked upon it as a wrong, but more like a gift."

"Oh, Cecilia!" His arms moved tenderly around her shoulders. She was against his breast for the third time in her life, and when his mouth touched hers the strength drained from her and she leaned heavily against him.

Then the gentleness was swept away under a passion that rocked them both and she felt as she had never felt from any touch or caress of Matthew's, she felt love flowing from her; yet her body remained full of it as if it were being fed from a great rushing river. She seemed to look back down the years to the source from where sprang this flood of feeling and saw that the spring had come into being when she had first fallen to the ground with him.

When it was over they both leaned against each other, and then, their eyes meeting, he laughed and it was the sailor laughing, the young man who had given her back her child laughing. Pulling her forward now almost at a run, he sat her on the couch and, fumbling in his pockets, he brought forth an envelope and a small red velvet box. Tapping the envelope, he said, "Guess what' this is?" And between laughter and tears she said, as she might have done to one of the boys, "You're not buying me a boat now, are you?" And his head went back and he laughed gaily, saying, "But that is an idea." He now pulled open the envelope and drew out a single sheet of thin paper and, putting it into her hands, he said, "It is the deed that is going to bond you to me for life, a special license. We are to be married on Monday morning at ten o'clock at St. Nicholas'. And this" --he now handed her the box"--is the symbol of my whole heart on it."

As she gazed at the ring, a cluster of diamonds and rubies, it was suddenly lost to her vision in the tears that stung her eyes and pressed out from her closed lids.

Holding her gently, he soothed her, and when she brought her head from his shoulder and asked tentatively, "But ... but what will they say, I mean with your ... His Lordship so recently gone?" he answered as the sailor would have done.

"I do not give a damn what they say. In any case we won't hear them.

But I know what he would have said. Do you know what he told Richard when the boy asked him about you? He told him that it was the greatest pity I hadn't run off with you in the first place." He looked deeply into her eyes as he finished.

"Richard told me that last night, after we returned home.... I think he would like to see you again before we sail."

When her head dropped and she made no answer, he said on a lighter and teasing note, "What do you intend to call me?"

"Call you?" She puckered her brow.

"You, Cecilia, as yet have never called me by my name; don't you think it's about time you started?"

Her lips went into a smile; her eyes looked at him softly. How often over the years had she said his name? No, not said it, thought it.

And so now, for the first time since her delirium, of which she had no real memory except that which Matthew had brought to the fore, she said it aloud, softly, tenderly; and he enfolded her again, and kissed her lips and her eyes and her hair.

Perhaps it was their engrossment in each other that made them deaf to the sounds of lowered voices in the hall, but at last they penetrated to Cissie and, drawing herself from his embrace, she looked at him and whispered, "The boys have come, I think."

"The boys?"

"My brothers. It's Jimmy's birthday, he's thirty- one."

"Well then, we must congratulate him and wish him many more birthdays.

Come. " He drew her hand through his arm, then firmly squeezed her fingers where they lay on his sleeve; and as he walked her with measured steps down the room she realized, and for the first time, that there was a lifetime of learning before her, not least the character of this man who one minute could be the easy-going sailor and the next Lord Fischel. When he was the latter, as now, he was very like his father. How would she like being loved by a man like his father? She would like it. Strangely, she had always pitied his father. It was the loneliness in him that called forth her pity, as it did in Clive.

Without being able to think this out she had known, through her senses, the need of both of them.

When he opened the door they stood framed within it, and there before them was her family, or a good part of it. Jimmy, William, and even Joe had come, and they had collected Annie and her husband, and there was also Sarah, but not Charlotte, for she had to stay and see to the shop. But there were six of them, five of them her own, and they were staring at her in amazed silence, until, turning to the man at her side, she said, clearly and firmly, "Clive, these are my brothers and sisters."

Clive Fischel looked at the group before him, respectable upper working-class citizens. He smiled at them frankly and said, "I am pleased to make your acquaintance." Then looking down at Cissie he demanded, somewhat imperiously, "Welll" But she remained mute and the smile she gave him had a slightly mischievous quality about it which he didn't fail to recognize. He turned his gaze upon the staring group again, gave a small cough, and said, "Your sister has done me the honor to promise to become my wife, and I'm afraid my gain will be your loss, for we're sailing for Spain on Monday evening. We are to be married on Monday morning. And" --he finished formally"--I hope you will give us the pleasure of your company at the ceremony."

Jimmy, William, Joe, Sarah, and Annie gaped at the man, the man who had done their Cissie down, the man who had brought misery into her life, but the man who had also been the means of keeping the girls from hunger for years. But now he wasn't just a man, he was a lord. He was Lord Fischel, and their Cissie was going to marry him. Dear God, they thought as one, life was funny, strange. But they were going to lose their Cissie. Things would never be the same without her, nothing would be the same. She was the rope that held them all together. As if all were motivated by the thought of the rope snapping, they surged towards her. Ignoring the man, they crowded round her, drew her from him, exclaiming, "Oh, our Cissie! Our Cissie...."

She was back in the dwelling place. She felt their need. Each one was pulling at her skirts, each one depending on her. Yet, even back there she had known that her love for them was a different love