continually) passionate love she had never rendered him.  She had been content; but how poor a thing was contentment!  She had never divined his worth, had never given her worship.  And all the while he had been a hero, and in the end had died as a hero.  Ah, for one chance to redeem the wrong! for one moment to bow herself at his feet and acknowledge her blindness!  Her prayer was ancient as widowhood, and Heaven, folding away the irreparable time, returned its first and last and only solace—­a dream for the groping arms; waking and darkness, and an empty pillow for her tears.

From the first her child had been dear to her; dearer (so her memory accused her now) than his father; more demonstratively beloved, at any rate.  But in those miserable months she grew to love him with a double strength.  He bore George’s name, and was (as Sir Harry proclaimed) a very miniature of George; repeated his shapeliness of limb, his firm shoulders, his long lean thighs—­the thighs of a born horseman; learned to walk, and lo! within a week walked with his father’s gait; had smiles for the whole of his small world, and for his mother a memory in each.

And yet—­this was the strange part of it; a mystery she could not explain because she dared not even acknowledge it—­though she loved him for being like his father, she regarded the likeness with a growing dread; nay, caught herself correcting him stealthily when he developed some trivial trait which she, and she alone, recognised as part of his father’s legacy.  It was what in the old days she would have called “contradictions,” but there it was, and she could not help it; the nearer George in her memory approached to faultlessness, the more obstinately her instinct fought against her child’s imitation of him; and yet, because the child was obstinately George’s, she loved him with a double love.

There came a day when he told her a childish falsehood.  She did not whip him, but stood him in front of her and began to reason with him and explain the wickedness of an untruth.  By-and-by she broke off in the midst of a sentence, appalled by the shrillness of her own voice.  From argument she had passed to furious scolding.  And the little fellow quailed before her, his contrition beaten down under the storm of words that whistled about his ears without meaning, his small faculties disabled before this spectacle of wrath.  Her fingers were closing and unclosing.  They wanted a riding-switch; they wanted to grip this small body they had served and fondled, and to cut out—­ what?  The lie?  Honoria hated a lie.  But while she paused and shook, a light flashed, and her eyes were open and saw—­that it was not the lie.