"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only
child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.

"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was
born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and
I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as
the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot
of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he
was taken ill."

He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."

"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his
age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I
knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New
Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of
the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed
by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There
was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and
disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back
of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave
birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was
disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her
protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very
meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had
been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she
was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody
would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.
Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional