of course, he could not start till he was of age. The
lamp on the table had a rose-coloured shade; he had been rowing--a very
cold day--and his face was glowing; generally it was rather pale. And
suddenly he smiled, and said: "It's rotten waiting for things, isn't it?"
It was then she had almost stretched out her hands to draw his forehead
to her lips. She had thought then that she wanted to kiss him, because
it would have been so nice to be his mother--she might just have been his
mother, if she had married at sixteen. But she had long known now that
she wanted to kiss, not his forehead, but his lips. He was there in her
life--a fire in a cold and unaired house; it had even become hard to
understand that she could have gone on all these years without him. She
had missed him so those six weeks of the Easter vacation, she had
revelled so in his three queer little letters, half-shy,
half-confidential; kissed them, and worn them in her dress! And in
return had written him long, perfectly correct epistles in her still
rather quaint English. She had never let him guess her feelings; the
idea that he might shocked her inexpressibly. When the summer term
began, life seemed to be all made up of thoughts of him. If, ten years
ago, her baby had lived, if its cruel death--after her agony--had not
killed for good her wish to have another; if for years now she had not
been living with the knowledge that she had no warmth to expect, and that
love was all over for her; if life in the most beautiful of all old
cities had been able to grip her--there would have been forces to check
this feeling. But there was nothing in the world to divert the current.
And she was so brimful of life, so conscious of vitality running to sheer
waste. Sometimes it had been terrific, that feeling within her, of
wanting to live--to find outlet for her energy. So many hundreds of
lonely walks she had taken during all these years, trying to lose herself
in Nature--hurrying alone, running in the woods, over the fields, where
people did not come, trying to get rid of that sense of waste, trying
once more to feel as she had felt when a girl, with the whole world
before her. It was not for nothing that her figure was superb, her hair
so bright a brown, her eyes so full of light. She had tried many
distractions. Work in the back streets, music, acting, hunting; given
them up one after the other; taken to them passionately again. They had
served in th