isible representative of all love and authority, the one
unchangeable, ever right, ever true. And now she had changed, and all
life was out of gear. His heart was sick, not because he was wronged,
but because everything had gone wrong. He did not doubt his mother's
love, he was not clear enough in his thoughts to doubt anything, or to
put the case into any arrangement of words. He felt only that he could
not bear it, that anything would be better than the present condition of
affairs. Geoff's heart filled and his eyes, and there came a constriction
of his throat when he realised the little picture of himself wandering
about with nobody to care for him, no lessons; for the first time in his
life forbidden to dart into his mother's room at any moment, with a rush
against the door, in full certainty that there could never be a time
when she did not want him. Self-pity is very strong and very simple in a
child, and to see, as it were, a little picture in his mind of a little
boy, shut out from his mother, and wanted by no one, was more poignant
still than the reality. The world was out of joint: and Geoff felt with
Hamlet that there was nobody but he to set it right. The water came
into his eyes, as he rode along, but except what he could get rid of by
winking violently, he left it to the breeze to dry, no hand brushing it
off, not even a little knuckle piteously unabsorbent, would he employ
to show to Black that he was crying. Crying! no, he would not cry, what
could that do for him? But something would have to be done, or said;
once the little floodgates had been burst open they could not close any
more.

Geoff pondered long, though with much confusion in his thoughts. He
was very magnanimous: not even in his inmost soul did he blame his
mother, being still young enough to believe that unhappy events come of
themselves and not by anybody's fault. To think that she liked Theo
better than himself made his heart swell, but rather with a dreadful
sense of fatality than with blame. And then he was a little backward
boy, not knowing things like Theo, whom, by the way, he no longer called
Theo, having shrunk involuntarily, unawares, out of that familiarity as
soon as matters had grown serious. As he thought it all over, Geoff's
very heart was rent. His mother had cried when she took him into her
arms, he remembered that she had kissed his cold feet, that she had
looked as if she were begging his pardon, kneeling by his side on th