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DARK HESTER

the walls as they had hung in all her makeshift homes all the thirty years since his death, and then at the goldfish in their bowl. Clive, from babyhood, had loved goldfish and she had always had them, too, in her drawing-rooms. Her eyes gathered an intentness as she watched the glancing fish, seeing herself suddenly like them, like them bright, rapid, frustrated, and the bitter flicker of a smile crossed her face as she took ants’ eggs from a little porcelain box and scattered them on the water. She went back, then, to the upper room,—‘I am restless,’ she thought. ‘Like the goldfish,’—and, beside the fire-place, she came to a standstill, putting her foot on the stone curbing, her hand on the high stone shelf and looking round her—at the walnut bureau where her mother had sat every day in the spacious London home of her girlhood; at the French clock that she and her father, the clever London judge, had bought in Paris; at the portrait of her Scotch great-grandmother, a girl with bare shoulders above white satin, pearls in her tawny hair, and blue eyes like her own; not soft, not gentle blue; intrepid, rather, and ardent with their smile. The faded chintzes on the chairs and sofas she and Clive had chosen together seven years ago, for the flat in Chelsea; every rose and pheasant and carnation

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