Grandmother sat very quietly at her sewing and soon went upstairs.  Grandmother was getting very old.  When she said “Good-night” she seemed to be speaking out of the cavern of some preoccupation, and when she went upstairs her shawl fell from her shoulders and trailed its corner on the ground.  Marion hoped that the old lady had not worn herself out by worrying about her, and she pulled out the sewing that had been shut up in the work-basket and meditated finishing it, but she was too tired.  Nowadays she knew a fatigue which she could yield to frankly, as it was honourable to her organism, and meant that her strength was going into her milk and not into her blood.  She folded her arms on the table and laid her head on them and thought of Richard.  It was his monthly birthday to-day.  He was three months old.  She grieved to think that she could feed him for only six months more.  How could she endure to be quite separate from him?  Sometimes even now she regretted that the time had gone when he was within her, so that each of her heartbeats was a caress to him, to which his little heart replied, and she would feel utterly desolate and hungry when she could no longer join him to her bosom.  But she would always be able to kiss him.  She imagined herself a few years ahead, calling him back when he was running off to play, holding his resistant sturdiness in her arms while he gave her hasty, smudged kisses and hugged his ball for more loving.  But she reflected that, while the character of those kisses would amuse her, they would not satisfy her craving for contact so close that it was unity with his warm young body, and she must set herself to be the most alluring mother that ever lived, so that he would not struggle in her arms but would give her back kiss for kiss.  She flung her head back, sighing triumphantly because she knew she could do it, but as her eyes met her image in the mirror over the mantelpiece she was horrified to see how little like a mother she was looking.  Lips pursed with these long imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child’s mouth; she had lost utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a child may sleep:  on a child’s path her emanations were beginning to cast not light but lightning.

She called out to herself:  “You fool!  If you really love Richard you will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him an orange and not a kiss!” But it seemed to her that this would be a sacrifice until, staring into the glass, she noticed that she was now more beautiful than she had ever been, and then she saw the way by which she could be satisfied.  Harry must come back; she knew he was coming back, for they had intercepted his letter to her, and they would not have done that if it had been unloving.  After she had weaned Richard she must conceive again and let another child lift from him the excessive