arrow chin that in its
delicacy seemed to her girlish. As she looked a sudden tremor ran over
her. She realised she had been gazing at it as at the picture of a
stranger, so altered did he look from when she had last seen him, over
two years ago.... For some reason that stuck-up Parson had made every
excuse for the boy to spend his holidays elsewhere for over two years.
She had not seen him since before his confirmation, which she looked on
vaguely as some sort of civil ceremony like a superior kind of getting
apprenticed ... perhaps as being definitely apprenticed to gentility.
She had had Vassie "done" at Plymouth for that reason. This strange boy,
this young man, was coming to-day to her house, which was his house ...
coming to upset everything. She stared again, trying to trace the
features she remembered after a fashion, but which love had never
imprinted on her memory with the only indelible draughtsmanship. She
turned backwards swiftly till she came to the beginning of the book,
where was another photograph taken from an old daguerreotype. It showed
Ishmael as a baby ... his mouth rather wet-looking, helplessly open, not
unlike Phoebe's now ... he seemed somehow a pathetic baby. Even Annie
was struck by it.

She laid the book on her slippery lap, whence it fell unheeded to the
floor, and stared in front of her.... Out of the dim past, almost as
dim to her as to an animal, came a memory, the memory of a touch. The
touch of a baby's hands feeling about her breast.... Not of Ishmael's in
particular--how should she, whose motherhood had been so forced, so
blurred a thing, keep one memory of it from another, or any that was not
purely animal ...? But it was his picture she had been looking at which
had brought the idea of babyhood back to her, and it was with him
personally that her mind connected the swift memory that was more a
renascence of an actual sensation. She closed her eyes and clutched at
the breast that had fallen on flatness. Her children would all go from
her except this one who was coming back.... A warmth that was
half-animal, and nearly another half-sentimental, rose in her heart, but
at least for the moment it was genuine. There was even some vague
feeling that she would protect him if the others made it hard for
him....

Wheels sounded on the cobbles of the courtyard, and the clatter of
hoofs; it meant that John-James and Vassie were back, bringing her son.
She got to her feet and went through the