merely struck her as typical of his new
nature, and she thought it rather shabby of Gabrielle, when, after
three days of waiting, she had not acknowledged the gift. Altogether
she felt that Mrs. Considine had been rather a broken reed as far as
Arthur was concerned. In the beginning she had taken to her, and
expected quite a lot of her. Arthur, too, seemed disturbed that she
did not reply. Day after day he waited for a letter from Lapton with
eagerness. There was no reason why he shouldn't have been anxious to
know that his present had not gone astray. She had not seen the note
that Arthur posted with his flowers.

With no more than the vaguest mistrust--for she still felt that in some
way she had fallen short of full possession, Mrs. Payne saw him return
to Lapton for the summer term. During the early weeks Arthur scarcely
ever wrote to her, and when she protested mildly, his reply seemed to
her evasive. It was a dutiful reply, and though she couldn't help
admitting that in Arthur the recognition of any duty was a new thing,
the suspicion that for some obscure reason she was losing him,
persisted. She was not in the ordinary way a woman of acute
intuitions, but her whole mind had been so wrapped up in that son of
hers that she was sensitive to the smallest changes of tone, and she
knew that while he was writing her letters his head had been full of
other things. At the same time she had sense enough to see that with
his recovery Arthur's life had become crowded with so many new
interests that she couldn't reasonably expect the old degree of
absorption in herself. This was the price of his recovery, and she
determined to pay it without grudging.

She settled down into this state of patience and resignation. She even
prepared to deny herself her usual privilege of a visit to Lapton in
term-time, feeling that it would be unfair of her to interrupt the
progress of Considine's remarkable system. In the meantime she kept in
touch with Arthur through her jealous care of the things that he had
left behind, in the arrangement of his books, in the mending of his
clothes, and in the preparation of an upstairs room that he had begun
to turn into a study for his holiday reading. On these inanimate
traces of him she lavished a peculiar tenderness, for their presence
had the effect of making her feel less lonely.

One day she took up to his new study a number of note-books that he had
used during the Easter holida