It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years.  Yet it seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen’s lover would be a living thing in thirty years’ time....  It would be immutably glorious as his mother’s love had been interminably grievous.  Yet suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant wooing any more.  It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his mother was going through one of her bad times.  He would have to go to Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.

And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else happened to blanch his temper.  A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood spattered on a curd-white face.  Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be need of a further errand to a cottage hospital.  He was in a jarred mood by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad’s suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little fingers to save a stranger’s life as resentment against Yaverland himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help.  They had known from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand the sturdy independence of the Scotch.  He began to fret at this delay among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.

But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain.  He rose and opened the door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad’s moans.  He shivered.  They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these.  He was twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of his week-ends at Yaverland’s End.  He had sat up late working, and as he was passing his mother’s door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail all through eternity.  It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so he went on to his room and sat on his bed.  After an hour he went out into the passage and listened.  She still was moaning.  Without knocking, lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.