entance, but he
protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
suddenly as children do.

She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
rose and left him.

Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily
through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart
wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew
that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had
been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going
to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that
she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve
this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the
open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by
some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all
poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate
for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.

She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and
humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of
nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the
woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way
touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her
eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went
round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop
on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was
pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark