She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap.  “Mother, what’s the matter?”

“The matter?”

“You were looking at me like a judge who’s passing sentence.”

“Well, perhaps I am,” she said wearily.  “Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father.”

His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father. 
“Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time.”

It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could free Richard from his excessive love for her.  He would not love her any more if she told him....  “But, oh, I couldn’t tell him that,” her spirit groaned.  “It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that.  It would spoil it to speak of it.”  But there was no other way.  If she were to go away from him he would follow her.  There was no other way.

She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes.  It was strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at each other quite like that.  She prepared to bring herself down like a hammer on her own delicate reluctances.

“Hush, Richard,” she said.  “You shouldn’t talk like that.  Perhaps I ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before he died.”

He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.

“Yes, the day before he died we made it up,” she began, but fell silent because of the beating of her heart.

Presently he broke out.  “What do you mean?  Tell me what you mean.”

“Why, let’s see, it was like this,” she continued.  “It was in the afternoon.  Half-past two, I think.  I was baking a cake for your tea.  Of course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house, which opened into the farmyard.  Well, I looked up and saw your father standing in the doorway.  I knew that meant that something strange was happening.  From his coming at all, for one thing.  And because he hadn’t got the dogs with him.  I knew that meant he’d wanted to be alone, which he hardly ever did.  Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia and Catullus died.  How funny—­how funny to think I never knew their names.”  This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled from each other’s lives filled her eyes with tears.  She encouraged them, so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.

Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded.  She went on chokingly:  “He said, ‘Well, Marion?’ I said, ’Well, Harry?  Come in, if you wish to.’  But I went on baking my cake.  He came and stood quite close to me.  There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped himself to one or two.  Then, all of a sudden, he said, ’Marion, I’ve got to have an operation, and they say I’m pretty bad.  I did so want to come and see you.’”

Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers.  “The whining cur!  The snivelling cur!  To come to you when he was afraid, after what he’d left you to for years.”