he dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which
he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia
and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their
names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled
from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them,
so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.

Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went
on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in,
if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite
close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped
himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got
to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come
and see you.'"

Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The
snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left
you to for years."

"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I
took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me
all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a
dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly
frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him
saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world,
will it be as jolly as this?'"

"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"

"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said
that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise
what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had
been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."

"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a
woman, what would you have said?"

"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for
one's husband. One expects much more."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his
eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a
house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we
talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to
him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been
worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But
men like him ache for