But before that moment came, Harry’s eyes would stray to the other child.  Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any expression, as common children’s do.  The situation was trodden into the mud.  They would pass on—­their hearts sunk deeper into dingy acquiescence in their separation.

Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger.  So far as externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.  Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard’s worst piece of naughtiness.  She took Richard’s illnesses lightly and sensibly.  But when Roger ailed—­which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a weak digestion—­she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary intensity on the minutiae of his treatment and diet as if she were attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on presenting itself at these times.  When they came to her on winter evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent, concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island.  She never gave any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing did he look well.  Never had she lifted her hand against him.

As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the other.  It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger, but she could not remember what.  Usually this happened after there had arrived—­as there did every six months—­parcels of toys, addressed to him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of paper scrawled “With love from father.”