comfort himself by thinking that if they were so kind he must have been wrong.  Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window than there was after any of his longer visits.  But so far as she was concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her heart.  She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which confirmed her dread.  He was always changing his situation and moving from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city, because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.

From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he would never admit that.  “I’m a funny chap, mummie,” he would say bravely, “I can’t bear being shut up in the same place for long.”  And she would nod understandingly and say, “Do as you like, dear, as long as you’re happy,” because he wanted her to believe him.  But she would be sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.  And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing would happen.  But what thing?  She would put her hand to her head, but she was never able to remember.

And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen; though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing.  She herself had never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it, but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had always done its duty by Roger.  It told, of course, the most moving story of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller’s in Watford and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his allowance, he could not possibly pay.