“And how is she otherwise?”

Again he shook his head.

“She is wretched, though they say that all she feels is dim and veiled, that we mustn’t think of her as actually unhappy.  Sometimes there are good days, when she takes a certain pleasure in her walks and in looking after a little plot of ground where she gardens.  And, thank God, that sudden outburst when she tried to kill me seems to have entirely passed from her mind.  They don’t think she remembers it at all.  But then the good days are rare, and are growing rarer, and often now she sits doing nothing at all but crying.”

Aunt Barbara laid her hand on him.

“Oh, my dear,” she said.

Michael paused for a moment, his brown eyes shining.

“If only she could come back just for a little to what she was in January,” he said.  “She was happier then, I think, than she ever was before.  I can’t help wondering if anyhow I could have prolonged those days, by giving myself up to her more completely.”

“My dear, you needn’t wonder about that,” said Aunt Barbara.  “Sir James told me that it was your love and nothing else at all that gave her those days.”

Michael’s lips quivered.

“I can’t tell you what they were to me,” he said, “for she and I found each other then, and we both felt we had missed each other so much and so long.  She was happy then, and I, too.  And now everything has been taken from her, and still, in spite of that, my cup is full to overflowing.”

“That’s how she would have it, Michael,” said Barbara.

“Yes, I know that.  I remind myself of that.”

Again he paused.

“They don’t think she will live very long,” he said.  “She is getting physically much weaker.  But during this last week or two she has been less unhappy, they think.  They say some new change may come any time:  it may be only the great change—­I mean her death; but it is possible before that that her mind will clear again.  Sir James told me that occasionally happened, like—­like a ray of sunlight after a stormy day.  It would be good if that happened.  I would give almost anything to feel that she and I were together again, as we were.”

Barbara, childless, felt something of motherhood.  Michael’s simplicity and his sincerity were already known to her, but she had never yet known the strength of him.  You could lean on Michael.  In his quiet, undemonstrative way he supported you completely, as a son should; there was no possibility of insecurity. . . .

“God bless you, my dear,” she said.

CHAPTER XIII

One close thundery morning about a week later, Michael was sitting at his piano in his shirtsleeves, busy practising.  He was aware that at the other end of the room the telephone was calling for him, but it seemed to be of far greater importance at the minute to finish the last page of one of the Bach fugues, than to attend to what anybody else might have to say to him.  Then it suddenly flashed across him that it might be Sylvia who wanted to speak to him, or that there might be news about his mother, and his fingers leaped from the piano in the middle of a bar, and he ran and slid across the parquet floor.