Sabina went to see her son and heard the farmer first.  He was not unfriendly, but declared Abel a responsibility he no longer desired to incur.

“He’s just at a tricky age—­and he’s shifty and secret—­unlike other lads.  You never know what’s going on in his mind, and he never laughs, or takes pleasure in things.  He’s too difficult for me, and my wife says she’s frightened of him.  As to work, he does it, but you always feel he’s got no love for it.  And I know he means to bolt any day.  I’ve marked signs; so it will be better for you people to take the first step.”

The farmer’s wife spoke to similar purpose and added information that made Sabina more than uneasy.

“It’s about this friend of his, Miss Waldron, that came to see him backalong,” she explained.  “He’d talk pretty free about her sometimes and was very proud of it when he got a letter now and again.  But since she’s wrote and told him she’s going to be married, he’s turned a gloomier character than ever.  He don’t like the thought of it and it makes him dark.  ’Tis almost as if he’d been in love with the lady.  You do hear of young boys falling in love before their time like that.”

Sabina was on the point of explaining, but did not do so.  Her first care was to see Abel and learn the truth of this report.  Perhaps she felt not wholly sorry that he resented this conclusion.  Not a few had spoken of Ironsyde’s marriage before her:  it was the gossip of Bridetown; but none appeared to consider how it must affect her, or sympathise with her emotions on the subject.  What these emotions were, or whither they tended, she hardly knew herself.  Unowned even to her innermost heart, a sort of dim hope had not quite died, that he might, after all, come back to her.  She blushed at the absurdity of the idea now, but it had struck in her subconsciously and never wholly vanished.  Before the engagement was announced she had altered her attitude to Raymond and used him civilly and shared his desire that Abel should be won over by his father.  The old hatred at receiving anything from Ironsyde’s hands no longer existed.  She felt indifferent and, before her own approaching problems, was not prepared to decline the offers of help that she knew would quickly come when Ernest Churchouse died.

She intended to preach patience and reason in the ears of Abel, and she hoped he would not make her task difficult; but now it was clear that Estelle’s betrothal had troubled the boy.

She saw him and they spoke together for a long time; but already his force of character began to increase beyond his mother’s.  Despite her purpose and sense of the gravity of the situation, he had more effect upon her than she had upon him.  Yet her arguments were rational and his were not.  But the old, fatal, personal element of temper crept in and, during her speech with him, Sabina found fires that she believed long quenched, were still smouldering in the depths of memory.  The boy could not indeed