e should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would
stand by her.

More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a
sheltering and protecting wall.

She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that
she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her
sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living
body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and
day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced
her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and
bloodless veins.

There was an exaltation in her anguish. Her tenderness, shot with pain,
was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. She went surrendered and
subdued to suffering; she embraced passionately her pain. It appeased
her desire for expiation.

They needn't have rubbed it into her so hard that it was her sin. If she
could have doubted it there was the other child to prove it. John Henry
Brodrick stood solid and sane, a Brodrick of the Brodricks, rosy and
round with nourishment, not a nerve, Henry said, in his composition, and
the stomach of a young ostrich. It was in little Hugh's little stomach
and his nerves that the mischief lay. The screaming, Henry told her, was
a nervous system. It was awful that a baby should have nerves.

Henry hardly thought that she would rear him. He didn't rub that in, he
was much too tender. He replied to her agonized questioning that, yes,
it might be possible, with infinite precaution and incessant care. With
incessant care and infinite precaution she tended him. She had him night
and day. She washed and dressed him; she prepared his food and fed him
with her own hands. It was with a pang, piercing her fatigue, that she
gave him to the nurse to watch for the two hours in the afternoon when
she slept. For she had bad nights with him because of the screaming.

Brodrick had had bad nights, too. It had got on his nerves, and his
digestion suffered. Jane made him sleep in a room at the other end of
the house where he couldn't hear the screaming. He went unwillingly, and
with a sense of cowardice and shame. He couldn't think how Jinny could
stand it with _her_ nerves.

She stood it somehow, in her passion for the child. It was her heart,
not her nerves, that his screams lacerated. Beyond her heavy-eyed
fatigue she showed no signs of strain. Henry acknowledged in her that
great q