Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did:  loneliness and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it was that she had borne.  The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his body.  She had loved Harry’s love for her because it made him quick and unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time.  Pride ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his spirit were poured out into his passion for her.  She had always known these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory.  For now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud by the fat man Peacey.  Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother of this splendid son.  What had happened to the man with whom, according to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all.  He had been so much less splendid than his son.

She grew well with happiness.  She became plumper, and there was colour on her cheeks as well as in her lips.  People ceased to treat her with the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy.  Presently she knew that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months.  She began to speak of it to Richard.  “Roger will be with us for Xmas,” she used to say.  “We must think out some surprises for him....”  To which Richard would answer tensely, “I s’pose so.”  That always chilled her, and she would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to speak of it just yet.  But once, as the days passed into December, she tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying:  “You might try to be a little more pleased about it.  I do want you and Roger to be nice to each other.”  He answered, looking curiously grown up, “Oh, Roger will always be nice to me—­you needn’t worry about that.”

As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger’s natural slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact, disliked him.  There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered judgment coming from a child.  She had wondered, looking at the beauty of his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which