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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
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