father had one of his bad turns.  It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice in a draper’s shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained of was that the “talk was bad.”  Tears came into his light eyes when he said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for her.  There would never be any end to that.  All through the midday meal he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and would say whistlingly:  “Ooh, mummie, d’you know, I used to think it must be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such another head of hair.”

But he was so good, so good.  He said to her in the afternoon as they walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, “You know, mummie, when I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said that I had better try my luck, but I mustn’t be disappointed if you didn’t want me.  But I knew you would, mummie....”

Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and that he was not complaining of it.  Flushing, she muttered, “I’m glad you knew how I felt, dear,” and all day she did not flinch.  When it was past eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, “Look who’s here, Richard!” She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance.  But Richard’s eyes moved to the stranger’s gaping, welcoming face, hardened with contempt, and returned to her face.  He became very pale.  It evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other people.  But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have come from some happy mother without a history:  “Richard! don’t you see it’s Roger!”