“Your loving old MUM.”

She frowned.  Louis had slid down to the floor and was curled up against the wall, making himself as small as possible, muttering, and occasionally grasping out at something that eluded him.

The next letter was very much the same as the first—­little loving messages, circumstantial accounts of trivial family interests.  Cook had been ill again and the soup was burnt one night because the temporary cook sent by Miss Watkin’s Agency was certainly not up to her job.  Mary had been to see “The Chocolate Soldier” again, and was very bored.  One of the Wayre girls—­the fair one—­had dyed her hair for a church concert and couldn’t wash it off again.

And he said these letters were a code!

Marcella had a quick struggle with two sides of her nature.  The Kelt in her hugged the thought that these were secret service papers to be guarded with her life for his sake, his country’s sake.  There was nothing extraordinary to her in the thought that, in the reign of George V, torturing enemies were abroad with knife and bastinado and poison cup.  She saw herself standing over his prostrate body, with countless slain enemies before her, and a dripping spear in her hand.  She got a glimpse of King George, with ringlets, velvet suit and Vandyke lace collar gravely smiling as he received the papers from her hands.  She was still in the romantic stage of kingship!  And then the stolidly common-sense Puritan ancestress in her made her laugh.  It was hard for her to disbelieve a romantic and perilous tale.  But these letters!  They were simply the pathetic love-letters of a mother to her boy, bringing an atmosphere of a commonplace, peaceful English home into all this madness.  With that the truth dawned on her.  There were eight of them, each mentioning money!  Louis had admitted not writing to his father to put a stop to his remittance.  She had forgotten to insist that it was done.  Here was the explanation of his present orgy!

He was kneeling on the floor now, trying to grip his bitten, bleeding fingers into the wall and crawl upwards.  He thought he was in a well, drowning.  As she bent over him the well vanished, and she became his enemy.  He made a desperate lunge at her and tried to grab his papers from her.  But his body was unco-ordinated; murder was in his brain, but it could not be transferred to his shaking hands with which he menaced her.

She was very much stronger than he, and all the stronger now that her acquired fear of unknown enemies had been laughed away.  The thing she realized most was that he must go to bed, that his wet clothes must come off for fear they gave him pneumonia; that, even if they were not wet, they must still come off and be locked up to keep him once again a prisoner.  Only, it seemed, in imprisonment, lay peace.  And peace was certainly not salvation!