lliams was absent from school. In the middle of the morning
there was a knock at the door: someone wanted the headmaster.
Mr. Harby went out, heavily, angrily, nervously. He was afraid
of irate parents. After a moment in the passage, he came again
into school.

"Sturgess," he called to one of his larger boys. "Stand in
front of the class and write down the name of anyone who speaks.
Will you come this way, Miss Brangwen."

He seemed vindictively to seize upon her.

Ursula followed him, and found in the lobby a thin woman with
a whitish skin, not ill-dressed in a grey costume and a purple
hat.

"I called about Vernon," said the woman, speaking in a
refined accent. There was about the woman altogether an
appearance of refinement and of cleanliness, curiously
contradicted by her half beggar's deportment, and a sense of her
being unpleasant to touch, like something going bad inside. She
was neither a lady nor an ordinary working man's wife, but a
creature separate from society. By her dress she was not
poor.

Ursula knew at once that she was Williams' mother, and that
he was Vernon. She remembered that he was always clean, and
well-dressed, in a sailor suit. And he had this same peculiar,
half transparent unwholesomeness, rather like a corpse.

"I wasn't able to send him to school to-day," continued the
woman, with a false grace of manner. "He came home last night
so ill--he was violently sick--I thought I
should have to send for the doctor.--You know he has a weak
heart."

The woman looked at Ursula with her pale, dead eyes.

"No," replied the girl, "I did not know."

She stood still with repulsion and uncertainty. Mr. Harby,
large and male, with his overhanging moustache, stood by with a
slight, ugly smile at the corner of his eyes. The woman went on
insidiously, not quite human:

"Oh, yes, he has had heart disease ever since he was a child.
That is why he isn't very regular at school. And it is very bad
to beat him. He was awfully ill this morning--I shall call
on the doctor as I go back."

"Who is staying with him now, then?" put in the deep voice of
the schoolmaster, cunningly.

"Oh, I left him with a woman who comes in to help
me--and who understands him. But I shall call in the doctor
on my way home."

Ursula stood still. She felt vague threats in all this. But
the woman was so utterly strange to her, that she did not
understand.

"He told me he had been beaten," continued the woman, "and
whe