I would gladly have gone with her, but, of course, that would have been too marked. Besides, I dared not face my mother without my father. There was a little fountain made of the mouths of lions on the terrace, which spouted out thin streams of water into a large oyster shell--the kind they call pecten , I think, only the round part as big as a horseshoe. And once Elsie was away with Mr. Bailiff Ball, I got father to wash his face and hands there, which were black and terrible with matted hair and hardened blood. So that my mother, for all her outcries, did not really see him at his worst, or anything like it.
The fire mounted always, but somehow in the light of day it did not seem real. The faces of all the folk as we returned from the water, were directed to the tower which was called H
