boots is right through, and his coat's half off
his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.
Shall I tell him to go away?"

But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.
She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a
minute."

Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each
other queerly.

She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook
haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably
haven't seen him since he was a boy."

"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at
the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and
unsuspicious."

Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face
suffused with the bloom of kind, sad passion, and lifted towards her
son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the
rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if
she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful,
closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some
hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated
her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private hoard
of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had
stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the
kitchen.

"Richard!" breathed Ellen.

He went on eating.

"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does
she want it to be Roger?"

"God knows, God knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are
lots of things about her that I don't understand."

Some moments passed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she
said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."

"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He
stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly,
coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out
suddenly. "Who is it?"

"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a
ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's
Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman
but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away
because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and
now he's on the road. I must give him something,