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Sensitive Tympanum. Marianne bore a daughter. William was delighted, but Marianne was jealous. "Take baby," she ordered the Maori nurse, "the noise she makes is not good for the tympanum of my ears." One day the Maoris attacked the house. "Hand me my corsets!" cried Marianne. But it was too late. In a scene which the Hays office will not allow to be filmed, Marianne was obliged to flee totally nude, in a shower of spears.
Marianne began to age. William grew totally bald, with "handsome, grey Dundreary whiskers." In the Channel Islands, despairing Marguerite shut herself up in a "little stone cell," finally became Mother Superior of a convent.
When they were nearly 70 William and Marianne decided to return to the Channel Islands. It was "a bad shock" for Marianne to find that her 63-year-old sister was still "strikingly lovely." When William saw her he began to sing: "My love's like a red, red rose." "You've never loved me," Marianne snarled, "You've been a liar always." "No lie," muttered William flushing. "Just a slip of the pen, my dear." Then, 46 years too late, he told Marianne about his epistolary error.
Marianne went straight to Mother Superior Marguerite. "You are his love," she said. But Marguerite only giggled in her still-childish way. "All this to-do about a portly old gentleman," she said scornfully. When William realized that the jig was up he decided to stick to Marianne. "She saw his tawny eyes blazing with love—for her. Now at last they were going to experience ... the fairyland of mutual love. . . . She had got him at last. Oh, the triumph of it!"
The Author. Slim, dark-eyed, unmarried Elizabeth Goudge (rhymes with stooge) lives with her invalid mother in the village of Westerland, Devon. Born (1900) in the ancient Somersetshire Cathedral city of Wells, she published a book of fairy tales at 18, then gave up writing to become a painter in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. Later she taught embroidery and leatherwork, then began to write again. A play about the Brontes, written when she was 32, ran in London for one night. In 1934 her first novel, Island Magic (about the Channel Islands), was published in England, the U.S., France and Germany. Her best-selling A City of Bells (about the city of Wells) followed two years later. Since then Author Goudge has averaged better than one novel a year—all suited, observes Critic Harry Hansen, to readers who want "a decorative style, free from profanity and coarse expression."