I'm as sorry for Paul as I am for you."
Maggie laughed."It's very kind of you to be sorry," she said, "but you needn't trouble.I believe we can look after ourselves."For a quarter of an hour after this conversation she was a little uneasy.He was a clever boy, Henry; he did watch people.But then he was very young, It was all guesswork with him.
She became now strangely quiescent; her energy, her individuality, her strength of will seemed, for the time, entirely to have gone.
She surrendered herself to Grace and Paul and Katherine and they did what they would with her.
Only once was she disturbed.Two nights before the wedding she dreamt of Martin.It did not appear as a dream at all.It seemed to her that she had been asleep and that she suddenly woke.She was gazing, from her bed, into her own room, but at the farther end of it instead of the wall with the rosy trees and the gold mirror was another room.This room was strange and cheerless with bare boards, a large four-poster bed with faded blue hangings, two old black prints with eighteenth-century figures and a big standing mirror.In front of the bed, staring into the mirror, was Martin, He was dressed shabbily in a blue reefer coat.He looked older than when she had seen him last, was stouter and ill, with white puffy cheeks and dark shadows under his eyes.She saw him very clearly under the light of two candles that wavered a little in the draught.
He was staring into the mirror, absorbed apparently in what he saw there.She cried his name and he seemed to start and turn towards the door listening.Then the picture faded.She woke to find herself sitting up in bed crying his name...
In the morning she drove this dream away from her, refusing to think of it or listen to it, but somewhere far down in her soul something trembled.