had
realized it for him. No sooner had he got his wonderful magazine into
his own hands than he found out how little he cared about it. He had
become more and more absorbed in its external and financial aspects. He
showed more and more as the man of business, the slightly hustled and
harassed father of a family. He had put off intellectual things. His
deterioration weighed on him when he thought of Jane. But Gertrude's
gentleness stood between him and any acute perception of his state.

Sometimes when they sat together over her fire, lit in the September
evenings, there would be long silences. Gertrude never broke a silence.
She was conscious of it; she, as it were, held it--he could almost feel
her holding it--tenderly, as if she loved it; she handled it gently as
if she were afraid that it would break. She gave him so much sense of
her presence and no more. She kept before him, humbly, veiled from his
vision, the fact that she was there to serve him.

Sometimes a curious shyness would come on her. It was not the poignant
shyness of her youth which Brodrick had once found so distressing. It
conveyed no fear and no embarrassment, only (so he made it out) the
quietest, subtlest hint of possible flight. Its physical sign was the
pale, suffused flame in Gertrude's face, and that web of air across her
eyes. There was a sort of charm about it.

Sometimes, coming upon Gertrude alone and unaware of him, he would find
her sad. He said to himself then that she had no great cause for gaiety.
It was a pretty heavy burden for her, this shouldering of another
woman's responsibilities. He thought that Jane had sometimes been a
little hard on her. He supposed that was her (Jane's) feminine way. The
question was whether he himself might not have been kinder; whether
there wasn't anything that he might yet do to make life sweeter to her.
He was, in fact, profoundly sorry for Gertrude, more profoundly sorry
than he had been ten years ago, when she had come to him, and he had
kept her, though he didn't want her, because he was sorry for her. Well,
he wanted her enough now in all conscience.

Then the horrible thought would occur to him: supposing Gertrude were to
go? It was not conceivable, her going.

For, above all her gifts, Gertrude was an incomparable mother to those
unfortunate children (since Jane's departure Brodrick had begun to think
definitely of his children as unfortunate). It was distinctly
pleasurable the feeling with