“I couldn’t bear to think of you p’raps going to bed and feeling that I was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I’ve got Jesus I’ll forgive anything that anybody does against me!” His voice wallowed rhapsodically.  “So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of going straight back to the Colony.”

Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to disassociate herself from him, from the situation.

“That was good of you,” said Richard.

“And now”—­the whistling tone came back in his speech—­“I want to tell mother!”

“You can’t do that.  She isn’t in.”

“What, weren’t you all out together?  Didn’t she come home with you?”

“No.”

“Then, love o’ goodness, where is she at this time of night?”

“Down on the marshes,” said Richard casually.  “She had a headache.  She thought a walk in the night air would do her good.”  Slowly and deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the table.

“Oh,” murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the wood.  Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his brother’s face.  “Here!  What’s the matter with mother?”

“Nothing!  Nothing!” exclaimed Richard in exasperation.  “She’s down on the marshes, having a walk.”

“Oh, but you can’t take me in that way!” the pallid creature cried, wringing his hands.  “I can see you’re frightened about mother!”

“I’m not,” said Richard vehemently.

“You needn’t try to fool me.  I’m stupid about everything else, but not about mother!  And I could always feel what was going on between you two.  Many’s the time I’ve had to leave the room because you two were loving each other so and I felt out of it.  And now I know you’re frightened about her!  You are!  You are!”

“I’m not!” shouted Richard.

Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight.  “If you’d got Jesus,” he said tartly, “you’d learn to be gentle.  Like He was.”  He recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy’s hand, which she tendered him deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for orders.  “Now you’d better tell me what it is about mother that’s making you frightened.  She’d not be pleased, would she, if she came in and found you treating me like this, as if I hadn’t a right to know anything about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?”

That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see.  He looked down at his white knuckles and unclenched his hands.  “It’s really nothing,” he told Roger in that false, kind voice.  “I went upstairs after dinner to look over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here.  When I came back Ellen told me she’d gone out for a walk on the marshes.  It struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went out and had a look round, but couldn’t see her anywhere.  There’s not the slightest occasion for worry.”