She paused a moment, stroking her dog’s ears, which twitched under her touch.

“I hope you are happy, Michael,” she said.  “I don’t think I am so happy as I used to be.  But don’t tell your father; I feel sure he does not notice it, and it would vex him.  But I want you to be happy; you used not to be when you were little; you were always sensitive and queer.  But you do seem happier now, and that’s a good thing.”

Here again this was all sensible, when taken in bits, but its aspect was different when considered together.  She looked at Michael anxiously a moment, and then drew her chair closer to him, laying her thin, veined hand, sparkling with many rings, on his knee.

“But it wasn’t I who made you happier,” she said, “and that’s so dreadful.  I never made anybody happy.  Your father always made himself happy, and he liked being himself, but I suspect you haven’t liked being yourself, poor Michael.  But now that you’re living the life you chose, which vexes your father, is it better with you?”

The shyness had gone from the gaze that he had seen her direct at him at dinner, which fugitively fluttered away when she saw that it was observed, and now that it was bent so unwaveringly on him he saw shining through it what he had never seen before, namely, the mother-love which he had missed all his life.  Now, for the first time, he saw it; recognising it, as by divination, when, with ray serene and untroubled, it burst through the mists that seemed to hang about his mother’s mind.  Before, noticing her change of manner, her restless questions, he had been vaguely alarmed, and as they went on the alarm had become more pronounced; but at this moment, when there shone forth the mother-instinct which had never come out or blossomed in her life, but had been overlaid completely with routine and conventionality, rendering it too indolent to put forth petals, Michael had no thought but for that which she had never given him yet, and which, now it began to expand before him, he knew he had missed all his life.

She took up his big hand that lay on his knee and began timidly stroking it.

“Since you have been away,” she said, “and since your father has been vexed with you, I have begun to see how lonely you must have been.  What taught me that, I am afraid, was only that I have begun to feel lonely, too.  Nobody wants me; even Petsy, when she died, didn’t want me to be near her, and then it began to strike me that perhaps you might want me.  There was no one else, and who should want me if my son did not?  I never gave you the chance before, God forgive me, and now perhaps it is too late.  You have learned to do without me.”

That was bitterly true; the truth of it stabbed Michael.  On his side, as he knew, he had made no effort either, or if he had they had been but childish efforts, easily repulsed.  He had not troubled about it, and if she was to blame, the blame was his also.  She had been slow to show the mother-instinct, but he had been just as wanting in the tenderness of the son.