ring in a bleak world without her.
With her he was himself, a released, freed self, growing daily further
and further away from all he had once been. Without her he felt he was
nothing but a fierce, wounded animal.

He tried to laugh at himself as he walked slowly away from Rachel's
house. He told himself that he was absurd, that an absence of a few days
was nothing. He turned his steps mechanically in the direction of his
mother's lodgings. At any rate, he could tell her. He could talk about
this cruel woman to her. The smart was momentarily soothed by his
mother's painful joy. He wrenched himself somewhat out of himself as she
wept the tears of jealous love, which all mothers must weep when the
woman comes who takes their son away. "I am so glad," she kept
repeating. "These are tears of joy, Hughie. I can forgive her for
accepting you, but I should never have forgiven her if she had refused
you--if she had made my boy miserable. And you have been miserable
lately. I have seen it for a long time. I suppose it was all this coming
on."

He said it was. The remembrance of other causes of irritation and
moodiness had slipped entirely off his mind.

He stayed a long time with his mother, who pressed him to wait till his
sister, who was shopping, returned. But his sister tarried long
out-of-doors, and at last the pain of Rachel's absence returning on him,
he left suddenly, promising to return in the evening.

He did not go back to his rooms. He wandered aimlessly through the
darkening streets, impatient of the slow hours. At last he came out on
the Embankment. The sun was setting redly, frostily, in a gray world of
sky-mist and river-mist and spectral bridge and spire. A shaking
path-way of pale flame came across the gray of the hidden river to meet
him.

He stood a long time looking at it. The low sun touched and forsook,
touched and forsook point by point the little crowded world which it was
leaving.

"My poor mother," said Hugh to himself. "Poor, gentle, loving soul whom
I so nearly brought down with sorrow to the grave. She will never know
what an escape she has had. I might have been more to her. I might have
made her happier, seeing her happiness is wrapped up in me. I will make
up to her for it. I will be a better son to her in future. Rachel and I
together will make her last years happy. Rachel and I together," said
Hugh, over and over again.

And then he suddenly remembered that though Rachel had taken her