ed, and a little later showed her to her room. In
the candle-light of the passage Mrs. Payne was assailed by an
overwhelming desire to break her promise and disclose her troubles to
Gabrielle. She felt that her quest was so lonely. Gabrielle seemed to
her sympathetic and she knew that it would be a great relief to her to
discuss the affair with another woman. As they paused at her bedroom
door, her old attraction towards Mrs. Considine that had once
culminated in an impulsive kiss took hold of her again. She wanted,
for some obscure reason, to kiss Gabrielle once more. Perhaps there
was something in the attraction of her opposite physical type that
accounted for this impulse as well as for Arthur's infatuation. For
the present she suppressed her inclination. After all Considine had
acted fairly enough with her, and she felt that she could not fail him
in a point of honour.

Alone in her room she read over Arthur's poems again. Now that she was
so near to him they impressed her less with a sense of fear and anxiety
than with one of pity and of love. He was her child, and therefore to
be protected and caressed. She found it difficult not to leave her
room in the night, and grope her way along the creaking corridors to
the room in which she knew he was sleeping. She wanted to kiss him and
hold him in her arms. She placed the poems on the table at her bedside
and blew out the candle. It was unfortunate for her bewilderment that
Arthur had not left in his notebook the rough copy of the verses that
he had sent to Gabrielle with the box of cowslips, the verses to which
she had not dared to reply.

Next morning at breakfast Arthur and his mother met. All through the
holidays she had been indefinitely conscious of an awkwardness between
them; now, with so much guilty knowledge in her mind, the relation
became definitely embarrassing. She wondered if he felt it as deeply
as she did. Certainly he showed no sign of any emotion but surprise at
her visit.

"But if you came last night, why on earth didn't you come along to my
room?" he said. "And why are you so mysterious? What's it all about?"

She put him off as well as she could. "I wanted to see you, that was
all," she said. "I thought you would be pleased by the surprise," and
then: "You don't seem very pleased."

"Of course I'm pleased," he said, blushing. "But I don't understand
it."

Whatever he said she knew in her heart that she wasn't wanted. I