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The porter's shouting was a welcome interruption, though it made Jenny realise with a blank feeling of anxiety and impotence that any time for persuasion was at an end.

"Do you want us to tell Father and Mother?" she asked as Mary got into the train.

"You needn't if you'd rather not. I'll write to them tonight."

She leaned back in the carriage, soft, elegant, perfumed, a little unreal, and yet conveying somehow a sense of desperate choice and mortal straits.

Peter and Jenny scarcely spoke till they were back in the car driving homewards. Then Jenny said with a little gasp—

"Isn't it dreadful?"

"What?—her going away?"

"No, the fact that she married Julian for love."

Peter said nothing.

"If she'd married out of vanity, or greed, or to please the family, it would have been better—one would have understood what's happened now. But she married him for love."

Peter still said nothing.

§ 20

He sat waiting at Starvecrow on an early day in February. Outside the rain kept the Feast of the Purification, washing down the gutters of Starvecrow's mighty roof, lapping the edges of the pond into the yard, and further away transforming all the valley of the Tillingham into a lake—huge sheets and spreads of water, out of which the hills of Barline and Brede Eye stood like a coast. All the air was fresh and washed and tinkling with rain.