“Is that you, Robert?  What is it, dear?”

So she had not been worrying about him at all.  She did not know that it was long past their usual supper-time.  She had been thinking of something else.  It made her seem a terrifyingly long way off, and he shuffled across the room to her, and touched her to make sure of her.  And it was strange that her hand glided over him anxiously, questioningly, as though in the darkness she too had been afraid and uncertain.

“Your form-master, Mr. Ricardo, has been here.  We’ve been talking about you.  Is your coat very, very torn?”

“Not—­not very.”

“Never mind.  I’ll mend it afterwards—­when you’ve gone to bed.”

Because he was so tired himself the unutterable weariness in her voice smote him on the heart unbearably.  He had never heard it before.  It made him think of her, for the first time, not just as Christine, who looked after him and loved him, but as someone apart whom, perhaps, he did not know at all.  Hadn’t they asked him, “Who is Christine?” And he hadn’t answered.  He hadn’t known.

“Mr. Ricardo says you will need a lot of help to pick up with the other boys.  Poor little Robert!  But he takes an interest in you, and you are to go to his house in the afternoon to be coached, and in a few weeks you will know as much as any of them.”

He did not know what “coaching” meant, but all of a sudden he had become afraid of Mr. Ricardo.  He did not want to go to him.  He knew that Mr. Ricardo would not like him to play with other boys, even if he got a chance.  He would want him to be alone and different always.

“He doesn’t believe in God,” Robert asserted accusingly.  “He said he didn’t.”

“Perhaps not, dear.”

“Doesn’t that matter?”

“I don’t suppose God minds—­if He exists.”

“Don’t you believe in Him, Christine?”

“I don’t know.  People say they believe too easily.  I expect I believe as much as the others.  With most of us it’s just—­just a hope.”

They had never talked together in that way before.  It made her more than ever someone apart from him, who had her own thoughts, and perhaps her own secret way of being unhappy.  He was frightened again, not of the darkness now, but of something nearer—­something so real and deadly that the old spectres became almost comic, like ghosts made up of dust-sheets and broom-handles.  Supposing Christine went still further from him—­supposing she left him altogether alone?  She wouldn’t do it of her free will, but there were things people couldn’t help.  People died.  The thought was a cruel hand twining itself into the strings of his heart.  He tried to see her face.  Was she young?  He didn’t know.  He had never thought about it.  She had been grown-up.  That covered everything.  Now in the pale, unreal light her face and hair were a strange dead gray, and she was old—­old.