THE OTHER MARGARET
501
"Oh, no," Lucy said in her most matter-of-fact voice. "Oh, no,
dear. It was just an accident."
"She meant to do it, she meant to do it." And then Margaret
said, "I
saw
her." She alone had been facing into the dining-room
and could have seen. "I saw her-with the napkin. She made a
movement," and Margaret made a movement, "like this ... "
Over her head her parent-s' eyes met. They knew that they
could only offer the feeble lying of parents to a child. But they were
determined to continue. "Oh, no," .Elwin said, "it just happened."
And he wondered if the king, within his line of vision as he stood
there trying to comfort his daughter, would ever return to the old,
fine, tragic power, for at the moment he seemed only quaint, extra–
vagant and beside the point.
"She meant to. She didn't like me. She hated me," and the great
sobs began to come. But Elwin knew that it was not because the other
Margaret hated her that
his
Margaret wept, but because she had
with her own eyes seen the actual possibility of what she herself
might do, the insupportable fact of her own moral life. She was
weeping bitterly now, her whole body shaking with the deepest of
sobs, and she found refuge in a comer of the sofa, hiding her head
from her parents. She had drawn up her knees, making herself as
tight and inaccessible as she could, and Elwin, to comfort her, sat on
what little space she allowed him on the sofa beside her, stroking her
burrowing head and her heaving back, quite unable, whatever he
might have hoped and wanted, to give her any better help than that.
