Mr. Pendyce could find no word to characterise his opinion of this offence, and drawing his breath between his teeth, passed into his dressing-room.  Mrs. Pendyce hastened quietly out, and went to her son’s room.  She found George in his shirtsleeves, inserting the links of his cuffs.

“Let me do that for you, my dear boy!  How dreadfully they starch your cuffs!  It is so nice to do something for you sometimes!”

George answered her: 

“Well, Mother, and how have you been?”

Over Mrs. Pendyce’s face came a look half sorrowful, half arch, but wholly pathetic.  ’What! is it beginning already?  Oh, don’t put me away from you!’ she seemed to say.

“Very well, thank you, dear.  And you?”

George did not meet her eyes.

“So-so,” he said.  “I took rather a nasty knock over the ‘City’ last week.”

“Is that a race?” asked Mrs. Pendyce.

And by some secret process she knew that he had hurried out that piece of bad news to divert her attention from another subject, for George had never been a “crybaby.”

She sat down on the edge of the sofa, and though the gong was about to sound, incited him to dawdle and stay with her.

“And have you any other news, dear?  It seems such an age since we’ve seen you.  I think I’ve told you all our budget in my letters.  You know there’s going to be another event at the Rectory?”

“Another?  I passed Barter on the way up.  I thought he looked a bit blue.”

A look of pain shot into Mrs. Pendyce’s eyes.

“Oh, I’m afraid that couldn’t have been the reason, dear.”  And she stopped, but to still her own fears hurried on again.  “If I’d known you’d been coming, I’d have kept Cecil Tharp.  Vic has had such dear little puppies.  Would you like one?  They’ve all got that nice black smudge round the eye.”

She was watching him as only a mother can watch-stealthily, minutely, longingly, every little movement, every little change of his face, and more than all, that fixed something behind which showed the abiding temper and condition of his heart.

‘Something is making him unhappy,’ she thought.  ’He is changed since I saw him last, and I can’t get at it.  I seem to be so far from him—­so far!’

And somehow she knew he had come down this evening because he was lonely and unhappy, and instinct had made him turn to her.

But she knew that trying to get nearer would only make him put her farther off, and she could not bear this, so she asked him nothing, and bent all her strength on hiding from him the pain she felt.

She went downstairs with her arm in his, and leaned very heavily on it, as though again trying to get close to him, and forget the feeling she had had all that winter—­the feeling of being barred away, the feeling of secrecy and restraint.

Mr. Pendyce and the two girls were in the drawing-room.