“Why yes, Mums.  I’m all right.”  Phil left his post on the rail and dropped into a chair beside his mother.  Perhaps he did it purposely lest she see too much.  “Don’t get notions in your head.  I like living in Dunbury.  I wouldn’t live in a city for anything and I like being with Dad not to mention the rest of you.”

Mrs. Lambert shifted her position also.  She wanted to see her son’s face; just as much as he didn’t want her to see it.

“Possibly that is all so but you aren’t happy for all that.  You can’t fool mother eyes, my dear.”

Phil looked straight at her then with a little rueful smile.

“I reckon I can’t,” he admitted.  “Very well then.  I am not entirely happy but it is nobody’s fault and nothing anybody can help.”

“Philip, is it a girl?”

How they dread the girl in their sons’ lives—­these mothers!  The very possibility of her in the abstract brings a shadow across the path.

“Yes, Mums, it is a girl.”

Mrs. Lambert rose and went over to where her son sat, running her fingers through his hair as she had been wont to do when the little boy Phil was in trouble of any sort.

“I am very sorry, dear boy,” she said.  “It won’t help to talk about it?”

“I am afraid not.  Don’t worry, Mums.  It is just—­well, it hurts a little just now that’s all.”

She kissed his forehead and went back to her chair.  It hurt her to know her boy was being hurt, hurt her almost as much to know she could not help him, she must just let him close the door on his grief and bear it alone.

Yet she respected his reserve and loved him the better for it.  Phil was like that always.  He never cried out when he was hurt.  She remembered how long ago the little boy Phil had come to her with a small finger just released from a slamming door that had crushed it unmercifully, the tears streaming down his cheeks but uttering no sound.  She recalled another incident of years later, when the coach had been obliged to put some one else in Phil’s place on the team the last minute because his sprained ankle had been bothering.  She and Stuart had come on for the game.  It had been a bitter disappointment to them all.  To the boy it had been little short of a tragedy.  But he had smiled bravely at her in spite of the trouble in his blue eyes.  “Don’t mind, Mums.  It is all right,” he had said steadily.  “We’ve got to win.  We can’t risk my darned ankle’s flopping.  It’s the bleachers for me.  The game’s the thing.”

The game had always been the thing for Phil.  Even in his blundering, willful boyhood he had played hard and played fair and taken defeat like a man when things had gone against him.

There was a moment’s silence.  Then Mrs. Lambert spoke again.

“Phil, I wish you would go to the dance with the girls.  It will please them and be good for you.  You can’t shut yourself away from everything the way you are doing, if you are going to make Dunbury your home.  Your father never has.  He has always given himself freely to it, worked with it, played with it, made it a real part of himself.  You mustn’t start out by building a wall around yourself.”