He said nothing, but stroked her hand.

“You will do that?” she almost shrieked.

He moistened his dry lips.  “I hadn’t thought ... quite so soon....”

“Why not?  Why not?”

“She is so very young,” he mumbled, and turned away his face.

“Why, Richard, Richard!” she exclaimed softly.  “God knows I’m not in love with old-fashioned ideas.  I’ve only to put up my hand behind my ear to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down Roothing High Street.  But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal.  And worst of all is this idea about marriage being dreadful.”  She blushed deeply.  “It’s not.  What you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not.  If Ellen’s old enough to love you, she’s old enough to marry you.  Oh, if you miscall—­that, you throw dirt at everything.”  She paused; and it rushed in on her that he, too, had told a lie.  To make an easy answer to her inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of the body was decorous and honourable.  Why were they beginning to lie to each other, like other mothers and sons?

He liked his error as little as she liked hers.  “It’s all right, mother,” he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false brightness:  “I’m sorry in a way I didn’t wait till to-morrow morning in town.  I wanted to buy something for Ellen.  I’ve never given her anything really good.  It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland.  I’ve got lots of money by me.  I thought a jade necklace.  It would look jolly with her hair.  Or, better still, malachite beads.  But they’re more difficult to get.”

“Ah, jewellery,” she said.

“Well, I suppose it’s the best thing to give a girl,” he assented, unconscious of her irony.

Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen, that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, “Thank you, they’re verra nice,” and grieve silently because no one had thought to give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love.  The heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost.  It was not well with him.  Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes.  This was not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span.  Well, outside the house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling under the dominion of the dawn.  The shadows of the trees would be lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon’s misconceptions of human