’Why didn’t you write to me from Wales, Winifred?  Why didn’t you answer my letter years ago?’

She hesitated, then said,

‘My aunt wouldn’t let me, sir.’

‘Wouldn’t let you answer it! and why?’

Again she hesitated—­

‘I—­I don’t know, sir.’

’You do know, Winifred.  I see that you know, and you shall tell me.  Why didn’t your aunt let you answer my letter?’

Winifred’s eyes looked into mine beseechingly.  Then that light of playful humour, which I remembered so well, shot like a sunbeam across and through them as she replied—­

‘My aunt said we must both forget our pretty dream.’

Almost before the words were out, however, the sunbeam fled from her eyes and was replaced by a look of terror.  I now perceived that my mother, in passing to the carriage, had lingered on the gravel-path close to us, and had, of course, overheard the dialogue.  She passed on with a look of hate.  I thought it wise to bid Winifred good-bye and join my mother.

As I stepped into the carriage I turned round and saw that Winifred was again looking wistfully at some particular part of me—­looking with exactly that simple, frank, ‘objective’ expression with which I was familiar.

‘I knew it was the crutches she missed,’ I said to myself as I sat down by my mother’s side; ’she’ll have to love me now because I am not lame.’

I also knew something else:  I must prepare for a conflict with my mother.  My father, at this time in Switzerland, had written to say that he had been suffering acutely from an attack of what he called ‘spasms.’  He had ’been much subject to them of late, but no one considered them to be really dangerous.’

During luncheon I felt that my mother’s eyes were on me.  After it was over she went to her room to write in answer to my father’s letter, and then later on she returned to me.

‘Henry,’ she said, ’my overhearing the dialogue in the churchyard between you and Wynne’s daughter was, I need not pay, quite accidental, but it is perhaps fortunate that I did overhear it.’

’Why fortunate, mother?  You simply heard her say that her aunt in Wales had forbidden her to answer a childish letter of mine written years ago.’

’In telling you which, the girl, I must say, proclaimed her aunt to be an exceedingly sensible and well-conducted woman,’ said my mother.

‘On that point, mother,’ I said, ’you must allow me to hold a different opinion.  I, for my part, should have said that Winifred’s story proclaimed her aunt to be a worthy member of a flunkey society like this of ours—­a society whose structure, political and moral and religious, is based on an adamantine rock of paltry snobbery.’

It was impossible to restrain my indignation.