lingly giving Richard a false impression of her
destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she
could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly
concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a
profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She
did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory
quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little
figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt
nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As
much as ever Roger was an orphan.

But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this
matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed
it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How
proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to
sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to
that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from
boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen
so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when
he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids
and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent
clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her
until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She
had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul
when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship,
he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"
She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather
roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting,
did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned
away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had
distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would
imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for
going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was
not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that
travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his
magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had
found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and
the far