hat were at once crafty and awed, as
children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some
important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant
resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow,
acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has
to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.
But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an
off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the
best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"
She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had
been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about;
it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups
were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....

As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and
rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment
so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the
benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that
her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no
longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she
wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week
before Christmas.

* * * * *

Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on
the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it
threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the
pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.
There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to
remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her
brainpan.

* * * * *

When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he
would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.
It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so
many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she
took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six
months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by
reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to
be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was
d