their eyes down here.  That would all break it to his mother gently.  She was getting old too—­she must be quite fifty—­and old people did not like to have reforms thrust upon them.  No, there should be nothing eager, aggressive about him.  He remembered stormy, excitable scenes of his childhood and resolved they should see what the self-control of a gentleman was like.  Thus Ishmael, with intentions not by any means, not even most largely, selfish.  Yet, of all moods, the worst to meet his mother’s.

The growing interest of the drive as they neared the north-west and the familiar landmarks of his childhood came into sight, flooded with the June sunshine—­the ruined mine-shafts staring up so starkly, the glory of white cattle in the golden light, the first glimpse of the pale roofs of Cloom itself, prismatic as a wood-pigeon’s plumage, all these things struck at his heart with a keener shock than did anything personal, and made thought of his mother sink away from him.  Behind the cluster of grey buildings he saw the parti-coloured fields stretching away—­green pasture, brown arable, pale emerald of the young corn—­all his.  He saw in folds of the land little copses of ash whose trunks showed pale as ghost-trees; he saw, gleaming here and there through the gorse-bushes, the stream that ran along the bottom of the slope below the cart-track that led to Cloom.  He saw the bleak, grey homesteads, cottages and small farms, set here and there, as he turned in his seat to look around him.  And his heart leapt to the knowledge that all these things were his....

Annie’s croaking cry, her thin arms, her quick straining of him, he all unprepared even for the mere physical yielding that alone saves such an embrace from awkwardness, found him lost.  Annie felt it and stiffened, and the moment had gone never to come back.  In after years, when Annie had magnified it to herself and him, accusing him of throwing her love back in her face when she had offered it, he was wont to reproach himself bitterly.  But Annie was so volatile in emotion, except where Archelaus was concerned, that her new flow would, in all likelihood, not have held its course for more than a few weeks at the best.  Ishmael knew this, but Annie, by dint of telling herself the contrary, never did.  The awkwardness of the actual moment was saved by Phoebe, who had hung in the background waiting for what she thought might be the most telling moment to glide forward, but who, her natural pleasure at sight of her old playmate suddenly overbearing more studied considerations, could contain herself in silence and the shadows no longer.

“Ishmael!” she cried, running forward.  “Ishmael!”

She held out her two hands and Vassie thought swiftly:  “It’s no good, my dear; he’s for your betters—­he and I ...” and with a worldliness that went far towards bearing out her claims to ladyhood she broke in with: 

“You remember little Phoebe, Ishmael—­from the mill....”