They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.

“You were quite right to whip me,” he told her.  “I wouldn’t have believed you were really cross if you hadn’t hurt me.”  Presently, when he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he sighed, “Oh, darling, the circus was lovely!  There were such clever people.  There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful lady in pink satin.  Mummie, you’d look lovely in pink satin!—­and she’d bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.  That was lovely, but I liked the animals best.  Oh, darling, the lions!”

She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he protested:  “Mummie, you are mean.  Now you’ve whipped me for going, surely I’ve a right to enjoy it.”  But he lay back and just gave himself up to loving her.  “Oh, you beautiful mummie.  You’ve such lots and lots of hair.  If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people do in the African forests, couldn’t they?  And they’d meet in your parting, and one would say to the other, ‘Mr. Livingstone, I presume?’” They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as suddenly as children do.

She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss nothing of his bloomy brownness.  He curled up when he slept like a little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely than any adult’s.  At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, “Wugh!” as she rose and left him.

Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him.  He had been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that she would never lose him.  “I must make myself good enough to deserve this,” she said prayingly.  As she went downstairs she looked through the open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.