with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less broad body.  She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest.  Penitently she dropped a kiss on his forehead and muttered, “Richard, you’re a good son.  You’ve made up for everything I’ve been through many times over....”

“Then stay up with me a little,” he said.  “Don’t let’s go to bed yet.”  He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the hearth till it faced the grate.  “Sit down, dear, and I’ll make you a fire.  Dear, do sit down.  This is the last night we shall have together.”  She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew to be in him a mask of intense desire.  He busied himself with the fire and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her lap and seemed to sleep.

But he did not.  Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep of his eyelashes.  “Why is he doing this?” she wondered; and discovered happily, “Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen.”  She waited serenely, while the clock ticked.

Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head.  “Mother, I like being here....”

She was not perturbed because he then fell silent.  It was natural enough that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.

But he continued:  “Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to my people, no matter how they’d treated me?  I wonder if you’ll think I’m mad?  I’d have stuck to them in any case—­because they’ve got the works on Kerith Island, and I’ve always wanted to work there.  Think of it!  I shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a place I’ve seen all my life out of these windows.  And all day long I’ll be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to our tree-tops.  Mother, I do love this house,” he said earnestly, raising his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him, though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before.  “It’s a queer thing, but though you’ve altered this completely from what it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar thing in the world.  And though it’s really rather exposed as houses go, hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place where nothing horrible could ever find me.  Do you feel like that, mother?”

She nodded.  “I might hate this house, considering all that’s happened here.  But I, too ...”  She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling.  “Yes, I love it.”