“Yes, I’m quite aware of that, mother.  So I say it’s quite unlikely that he will ever ask me to marry him.”

Then she left the room, and they discussed the advisability of keeping her with them.  The fact that she saved the expense of Miss Hatch’s services as music-mistress weighed ponderously in the balance, swung down the scales.  They tacitly passed the matter over.

Upstairs Sally was saying good night to Maurie.  “I only want you, my darling,” she whispered in the darkness.  “I don’t want anybody else now—­say you know I don’t want anybody else.”

“But you can’t,” he replied simply; “I’m mummy’s.”

Sally stood up from the bed.  “Yes—­you’re mummy’s,” she repeated under her breath, and she repeated it again.  She went into her bedroom, beginning slowly to undress, still repeating it.

From that day onwards, whenever possible, she avoided Mr. Grierson as you skirt a district where fever rages.  He was too good a man, too honourable, for her to throw her life in his way.  All the outlook of men upon a woman such as herself, which Devenish that evening had shown her, rose warningly to thwart her from taking the opportunity which circumstances seemed generously to be offering.  The love of Traill was in no wise lessened in her heart; but now, lifting beside it, had come this love of a child, and with the knowledge that Maurie could never be hers, the insensate desire to bear children of her own rose exultantly within her.  If she were to marry, this would be her portion.  If she were to marry for that reason, above all, would she separate herself for ever from the hope—­the still flickering hope—­that Traill might one day return?

Whilst one impulse, then, pressed her forward to the seeking of the better acquaintance with Wilfrid Grierson, the fear that she was unfit to be the wife of any so honourable as he withheld her.

But fate, circumstance—­give it any name that pleases—­was in its obstinate mood.  That better acquaintance, it was determined, should be made.

One afternoon, while Maurie was at his lessons, and her own work for the day was over, she was walking through those apple orchards which spread up to the side of that little lane which leads down off the London Road.  Supremely unconscious of whose property it was in which she was wandering, she suddenly became aware of a figure descending from one of the apple trees.  The first thought that some one was stealing the fruit was driven from her when she recognized Mr. Grierson.

Before he had seen her, she had turned and hurried back in the direction in which she had come.  A break in the hedge had given her entrance from the lane.  She made as quickly as possible for that.  But the sound of footsteps running over the soft ground, the hissing of the grass stems as they lashed against leather leggings, then the sound of her name, showed her that it was too late.  She turned.

“I saw you getting down from the tree,” she said evasively, “but I thought it was a man stealing fruit.”