Christine hardly answered.  Her fragile face wore the look of quiet obstinacy which had braved James Stonehouse and the worst disasters.  Robert had seen it too often not to understand.  But now his father was dead, and instead; inexplicably, he had become the source of trouble.  He disgraced Christine.  Her people hated her because she was good to him.  He felt the shame of it all over him like a horrible kind of uncleanliness, and beneath the shame a burning sense of wrong.  He hid in dark places.  He refused to answer even when Christine called him.  He skulked miserably past Christine’s sisters when he met them in the passage.  He scowled at them, his head down, like a hobbled, angry little bull.  And Christine’s sisters drew in their nostrils in a last genteel effort at self-control.

Christine packed his trunk with ragged odds and ends of clothing, and they made a long journey to No. 14, Acacia Grove, where Christine had taken two furnished rooms and a scullery, which served also as kitchen and bath-room.  Acacia Grove was the deformed extremity of a misbegotten suburb.  There were five acacia trees planted on either side of the unfinished roadway, but they had been blighted in their youth, and their branches were spinsterish and threadbare.  Behind the houses were a few dingy fields, and then a biscuit factory, an obscene, congested-looking building with belching chimneys.

Every morning at nine o’clock Robert walked with Christine to the corner of the road, and a jolly, red-faced ’bus, rollicking through the neighbourhood like a slightly intoxicated reveller who has landed by mistake in a gathering of Decayed Gentlefolk, carried her off citywards, and at dusk returned her again, grey and worn, with wisps of tired brown hair hanging about her face and bundles of solemn letters and folded parchment documents bulging from her dispatch-case.  Then she and Robert shopped together at the Stores, and afterwards she cooked over a gas-jet in the scullery, and they had supper together, almost in the dark, but very peacefully.

It was too peaceful.  One couldn’t believe in it.  When supper was over Robert washed up and Christine uncovered the decrepit, second-hand typewriter which she had bought, and began to copy from the letters, bending lower and lower over the crabbed writing and sighing deeply and impatiently as her fingers blundered at the keys.  On odd nights, when there was no copying to be done, she tried to teach Robert his letters and words of one syllable, but they were both too tired, and he yawned and kicked the table and was cross and stupid with sleepiness.  At nine o’clock he washed himself cautiously and crept into the little bed beside her big one and lay curled up, listening to the reassuring click-click of the typewriter, until suddenly it was broad daylight again, and there was Christine getting breakfast.