But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap.  She did not open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.  His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an Indian’s in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.  That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think of Richard’s actions as being good or bad, but only as being different in colour and lustre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are pearls, and there are emeralds.  But it made her feel lonely, and she turned soberly to opening her letter.  It was from Roger.  He was in trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help.  At first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly:  “Richard, how can I cable money to Roger?  He wants it quickly.  And, Richard, I think I should go home and look after him.”  Richard had set his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment’s quivering silence, had broken into curses.  “Oh, don’t speak of poor Roger like that!” she had cried out, and he had answered terribly:  “I’m not speaking of him; I’m speaking of my father, who let you in for all this.”  She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace with his father before he died.  Not even for Harry’s sake would she imperil the love between her and her son.

She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been useless.  Roger would never come back to live with her.  All she could do was to sit at Yaverland’s End, ready to receive him when he turned up, as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was going to do in the future.  Usually on these occasions he brought her a present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a glass jar of preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking magnificent when he saw it in the grocer’s shop.  She would kiss him gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in cities.

A regular routine followed these visits.  First he wrote happy letters home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job and owed money to the landlady.  Then she would seek him out, wherever he was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an irremovable feeling