She stared at it longer than at any of the others, then, at last turning the page, came on a photograph of Ishmael, sent by him from St. Renny at the Parson’s instigation.  She stared at the mouth that, with its more generous curves, was yet so like her own, at the square brow that never came from her side of the family, at the narrow chin that in its delicacy seemed to her girlish.  As she looked a sudden tremor ran over her.  She realised she had been gazing at it as at the picture of a stranger, so altered did he look from when she had last seen him, over two years ago....  For some reason that stuck-up Parson had made every excuse for the boy to spend his holidays elsewhere for over two years.  She had not seen him since before his confirmation, which she looked on vaguely as some sort of civil ceremony like a superior kind of getting apprenticed ... perhaps as being definitely apprenticed to gentility.  She had had Vassie “done” at Plymouth for that reason.  This strange boy, this young man, was coming to-day to her house, which was his house ... coming to upset everything.  She stared again, trying to trace the features she remembered after a fashion, but which love had never imprinted on her memory with the only indelible draughtsmanship.  She turned backwards swiftly till she came to the beginning of the book, where was another photograph taken from an old daguerreotype.  It showed Ishmael as a baby ... his mouth rather wet-looking, helplessly open, not unlike Phoebe’s now ... he seemed somehow a pathetic baby.  Even Annie was struck by it.

She laid the book on her slippery lap, whence it fell unheeded to the floor, and stared in front of her....  Out of the dim past, almost as dim to her as to an animal, came a memory, the memory of a touch.  The touch of a baby’s hands feeling about her breast....  Not of Ishmael’s in particular—­how should she, whose motherhood had been so forced, so blurred a thing, keep one memory of it from another, or any that was not purely animal ...?  But it was his picture she had been looking at which had brought the idea of babyhood back to her, and it was with him personally that her mind connected the swift memory that was more a renascence of an actual sensation.  She closed her eyes and clutched at the breast that had fallen on flatness.  Her children would all go from her except this one who was coming back....  A warmth that was half-animal, and nearly another half-sentimental, rose in her heart, but at least for the moment it was genuine.  There was even some vague feeling that she would protect him if the others made it hard for him....

Wheels sounded on the cobbles of the courtyard, and the clatter of hoofs; it meant that John-James and Vassie were back, bringing her son.  She got to her feet and went through the house to the yard door, already recovering a little of poise, which meant artificiality, but still with something of that real glow about her.  She knew a moment of dread lest Ishmael should rebuff it.  She held out her arms with an uncontrolled gesture, and heard her own voice call his name on an ugly piping note she could not have told was hers.