She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and humble.  In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her.  A nightingale sang in the woods across the lane.  These things seemed to her to be in some way touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature’s sympathy.  She went round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world.  The silence of the farmyard was pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts.  The dark doors and windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they were consciously preserving their occupants from the night’s magic.  As she walked to the garden’s edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks.  The round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within the house was Richard.  All was beauty.

Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother?  She stood there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went back to the house.

She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door was open and giving out a faint ray of light.  She pulled it open and saw the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the jar into his mouth.  A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it, threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull.  It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair, the floor.  She lifted the child down and struck it.  It gave her the most extraordinary pleasure to strike it.  She struck it three times, and each time it was as good as drinking wine.  Then she fell forward on her knees and covered her face with her hands.  The child ceased to howl and put its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it.  Still, she submitted to its embrace, and muttered in abasement:  “Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn’t have done that!”

The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam, and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that anybody had behaved badly to it.  There was nothing to do but to give it a kiss and take it off to bed.  When she saw its horrid little body stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether very much force would be needed to kill it.