be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think
I've ever seen such another head of hair."

But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they
walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of
which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when
I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said
that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you
didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."

Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a
kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try
his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and
that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you
knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past
eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she
had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they
ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into
the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly
excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here,
Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who
defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not
like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But
Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened
with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It
evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a
third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself
felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other
people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have
come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see
it's Roger!"

Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for
him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure,
she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome
having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But
her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it
was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of
a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his
coming, when R