rror and by a sort of shame. She did not even look at her son, but
cast timid glances round his room. She saw a gallery at the far end,
and a conical roof half made of glass. She saw curtains hanging all
the gallery length, a table with tea-things and decanters, a round iron
stove, rugs on the floor, and a large full-length mirror in the centre
of the wall. A silver cup of flowers was reflected in that mirror.
Mrs. Pendyce saw that they were dead, and the sense of their vague and
nauseating odour was her first definite sensation.

"Your flowers are dead, my darling," she said. "I must get you some
fresh!"

Not till then did she look at George. There were circles under his eyes;
his face was yellow; it seemed to her that it had shrunk. This terrified
her, and she thought:

'I must show nothing; I must keep my head!'

She was afraid--afraid of something desperate in his face, of something
desperate and headlong, and she was afraid of his stubbornness, the
dumb, unthinking stubbornness that holds to what has been because it has
been, that holds to its own when its own is dead. She had so little of
this quality herself that she could not divine where it might lead him;
but she had lived in the midst of it all her married life, and it seemed
natural that her son should be in danger from it now.

Her terror called up her self-possession. She drew George down on the
sofa by her side, and the thought flashed through her: 'How many times
has he not sat here with that woman in his arms!'

"You didn't come for me last night, dear! I got the tickets, such good
ones!"

George smiled.

"No," he said; "I had something else to see to!"

At sight of that smile Margery Pendyce's heart beat till she felt sick,
but she, too, smiled.

"What a nice place you have here, darling!"

"There's room to walk about."

Mrs. Pendyce remembered the sound she had heard of pacing to and fro.
From his not asking her how she had found out where he lived she knew
that he must have guessed where she had been, that there was nothing for
either of them to tell the other. And though this was a relief, it
added to her terror--the terror of that which is desperate. All sorts of
images passed through her mind. She saw George back in her bedroom after
his first run with the hounds, his chubby cheek scratched from forehead
to jaw, and the bloodstained pad of a cub fox in his little gloved hand.
She saw him sauntering into her room the last day of the