But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face against her hand, and began to kiss it.  Then he pulled himself up and sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking, “Mother, I would like to kill them all!  Oh, you poor little mother!  I love you so, I love you so....”  He buried his face in the clothes for one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears, slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things.  She crooned with relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself.  He did not want to go.  That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped softly into dreamless sleep.

Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced by her son?  There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes against her mouth.  How can one know what to do in this life?  Surely it is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by calling “Richard!  Richard!” she could now bring her worst and longest dream to an end.  Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his childhood.  Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt.  She could not understand what it meant.  It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey’s villainy, he was plainly concluding that what had broken her was Harry’s desertion.  But it was a profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing.  She did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory quality that it might ever have had.  For now, when she evoked the little figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt nothing.  There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart.  As much as ever Roger was an orphan.

But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed it.  For Roger came back.  Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea.  How proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to sea!  He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to that irascible feat of forcing life’s hand and leaping straight from boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen so that he should be admirable to his mother.  During the holidays, when he formed the intention, she had