“Dick has secrets,” Sybil said, “secrets from me.  It used not to be so.  I have always known how a want of sympathy makes a child hide what he feels and thinks, and drives him in upon himself, to feed his thoughts with imaginings and dreams.  I have seen it.  I don’t believe that anything but harm ever comes of it.  It builds up a barrier which will last for life.  I did not want that barrier to rise between Dick and me—­I—­” and her voice shook a little—­“I should be very unhappy if it were to rise.  So I have always tried to be his friend and comrade, rather than his mother.”

“Yes,” said Colonel Dewes, wisely nodding his head.  “I have seen you playing cricket with him.”

Colonel Dewes had frequently been puzzled by a peculiar change of manner in his friends.  When he made a remark which showed how clearly he understood their point of view and how closely he was in agreement with it, they had a way of becoming reticent in the very moment of expansion.  The current of sympathy was broken, and as often as not they turned the conversation altogether into a conventional and less interesting channel.  That change of manner became apparent now.  Sybil Linforth leaned back and abruptly ceased to speak.

“Please go on,” said Dewes, turning towards her.

She hesitated, and then with a touch of reluctance continued: 

“I succeeded until a month or so ago.  But a month or so ago the secrets came.  Oh, I know him so well.  He is trying to hide that there are any secrets lest his reticence should hurt me.  But we have been so much together, so much to each other—­how should I not know?” And again she leaned forward with her hands clasped tightly together upon her knees and a look of great distress lying like a shadow upon her face.  “The first secrets,” she continued, and her voice trembled, “I suppose they are always bitter to a mother.  But since I have nothing but Dick they hurt me more deeply than is perhaps reasonable”; and she turned towards her companion with a poor attempt at a smile.

“What sort of secrets?” asked Dewes.  “What is he hiding?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, and she repeated the words, adding to them slowly others.  “I don’t know—­and I am a little afraid to guess.  But I know that something is stirring in his mind, something is—­” and she paused, and into her eyes there came a look of actual terror—­“something is calling him.  He goes alone up on to the top of the Downs, and stays there alone for hours.  I have seen him.  I have come upon him unawares lying on the grass with his face towards the sea, his lips parted, and his eyes strained, his face absorbed.  He has been so lost in dreams that I have come close to him through the grass and stood beside him and spoken to him before he grew aware that anyone was near.”

“Perhaps he wants to be a sailor,” suggested Dewes.

“No, I do not think it is that,” Sybil answered quietly.  “If it were so, he would have told me.”