For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she coveted more than any pleasure.  But that process, if it ever had begun, was stopped when Richard was fifteen.

It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays, that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that she had started up, crying out, “Harry!  Harry!” She heard the latch of the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.  Half asleep, she mumbled, “Harry, it can’t be you?...”  A voice answered haltingly, “No,” and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and lit the candle by her bedside.  She could not see him, for the light was too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, “Go to bed, I’m all right, all right.”  But he sat down on her bed and took her hand in his, and said sullenly, “You’ve been calling out for my father.  Why are you doing that?” She whimpered, “Nothing.  I was only dreaming.”  But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep.  “I know all about it, mother.  The other boys told me about it.  And Goodtart said something once.”  His hand tightened on hers.  “You used to meet him up at that temple.”  For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and then persisted, “What is it?  Why do you cry almost every night?  I’ve heard you ever so often.  You’ve got to tell me what’s the matter.”

She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid for a moment.  Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it.  In her long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the shore by a magician’s spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him so that he bent down and kissed her.  It was as if the heat of his lips dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out:  “It’s when the boy touches me with a stick that I can’t bear it!”

“What boy did that?”

“I think it was Ned Turk.  When I was stoned down Roothing High Street.”

“Mother, mother.  Tell me about that.”

She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually became wet with sweat.  At the end of her telling she drew her hair across her face and looked up at him through it.  “Have I lost him?” she wondered.  “Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had happened to me.”  Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself, “Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!”