“Don’t you?” she asked.  “But I do.  It’s because you know I care.  Otherwise you wouldn’t tell me:  you couldn’t.”

For a moment the balance quavered in his mind between Sylvia the beloved and Sylvia the friend.  It inclined to the friend.

“Yes, that’s why,” he said.  “And I reproach myself, you know.  All these years I might, if I had tried harder, have been something to my mother.  I might have managed it.  I thought—­at least I felt—­that she didn’t encourage me.  But I was a beast to have been discouraged.  And now her wanting me has come just when it isn’t her unclouded self that wants me.  It’s as if—­as if it had been raining all day, and just on sunset there comes a gleam in the west.  And so soon after it’s night.”

“You made the gleam,” said Sylvia.

“But so late; so awfully late.”

Suddenly he stood stiff, listening to some sound which at present she did not hear.  It sounded a little louder, and her ears caught the running of footsteps on the stairs outside.  Next moment the door opened, and Lady Ashbridge’s maid put in a pale face.

“Will you go to her ladyship, my lord?” she said.  “Her nurse wants you.  She told me to telephone to Sir James.”

Sylvia moved with him, not disengaging her arm, towards the door.

“Michael, may I wait?” she said.  “You might want me, you know.  Please let me wait.”

Lady Ashbridge’s room was on the floor above, and Michael ran up the intervening stairs three at a time.  He knocked and entered and wondered why he had been sent for, for she was sitting quietly on her sofa near the window.  But he noticed that Nurse Baker stood very close to her.  Otherwise there was nothing that was in any way out of the ordinary.

“And here he is,” said the nurse reassuringly as he entered.

Lady Ashbridge turned towards the door as Michael came in, and when he met her eyes he knew why he had been sent for, why at this moment Sir James was being summoned.  For she looked at him not with the clouded eyes of affection, not with the mother-spirit striving to break through the shrouding trouble of her brain, but with eyes of blank non-recognition.  She saw him with the bodily organs of her vision, but the picture of him was conveyed no further:  there was a blank wall behind her eyes.

Michael did not hesitate.  It was possible that he still might be something to her, that he, his presence, might penetrate.

“But you are not resting, mother,” he said.  “Why are you sitting up?  I came to talk to you, as I said I would, while you rested.”

Suddenly into those blank, irresponsive eyes there leaped recognition.  He saw the pupils contract as they focused themselves on him, and hand in hand with recognition there leaped into them hate.  Instantly that was veiled again.  But it had been there, and now it was not banished; it lurked behind in the shadows, crouching and waiting.