dyce remembered the sound she had heard of pacing to and fro.
From his not asking her how she had found out where he lived she knew
that he must have guessed where she had been, that there was nothing for
either of them to tell the other. And though this was a relief, it added
to her terror--the terror of that which is desperate. All sorts of
images passed through her mind. She saw George back in her bedroom after
his first run with the hounds, his chubby cheek scratched from forehead
to jaw, and the bloodstained pad of a cub fox in his little gloved hand.
She saw him sauntering into her room the last day of the 1880 match at
Lord's, with a battered top-hat, a blackened eye, and a cane with a
light-blue tassel. She saw him deadly pale with tightened lips that
afternoon after he had escaped from her, half cured of laryngitis, and
stolen out shooting by himself, and she remembered his words: "Well,
Mother, I couldn't stand it any longer; it was too beastly slow!"

Suppose he could not stand it now! Suppose he should do something rash!
She took out her handkerchief.

"It's very hot in here, dear; your forehead is quite wet!"

She saw his eyes turn on her suspiciously, and all her woman's wit stole
into her own eyes, so that they did not flicker, but looked at him with
matter-of-fact concern.

"That skylight is what does it," he said. "The sun gets full on there."

Mrs. Pendyce looked at the skylight.

"It seems odd to see you here, dear, but it's very nice--so
unconventional. You must let me put away those poor flowers!" She went
to the silver cup and bent over them. "My dear boy, they're quite nasty!
Do throw them outside somewhere; it's so dreadful, the smell of old
flowers!"

She held the cup out, covering her nose with her handkerchief.

George took the cup, and like a cat spying a mouse, Mrs. Pendyce watched
him take it out into the garden. As the door closed, quicker, more
noiseless than a cat, she slipped behind the curtains.

'I know he has a pistol,' she thought.

She was back in an instant, gliding round the room, hunting with her eyes
and hands, but she saw nothing, and her heart lightened, for she was
terrified of all such things.

'It's only these terrible first hours,' she thought.

When George came back she was standing where he had left her. They sat
down in silence, and in that silence, the longest of her life, she seemed
to feel all that was in his heart, all the blackness and bitt