Mrs. Bellew came out soon after he was gone.  She closed the door behind her, and stood still.  Taking from her pocket the bulky envelope, she slipped it into the letter-box; then bending down, picked up a twig, and placed it in the slit, to prevent the lid falling with a rattle.  Having done this, she swept her hands down her face and breast as though to brush something from her, and walked away.  Beyond the outer gate she turned to the left, and took the same street back to the river.  She walked slowly, luxuriously, looking about her.  Once or twice she stopped, and drew a deep breath, as though she could not have enough of the air.  She went as far as the Embankment, and stood leaning her elbows on the parapet.  Between the finger and thumb of one hand she held a small object on which the sun was shining.  It was a key.  Slowly, luxuriously, she stretched her hand out over the water, parted her thumb and finger, and let it fall.

CHAPTER IV

MRS. PENDYCE’S INSPIRATION

But George did not come to take his mother to the theatre, and she whose day had been passed in looking forward to the evening, passed that evening in a drawing-room full of furniture whose history she did not know, and a dining-room full of people eating in twos and threes and fours, at whom she might look, but to whom she must not speak, to whom she did not even want to speak, so soon had the wheel of life rolled over her wonder and her expectation, leaving it lifeless in her breast.  And all that night, with one short interval of sleep, she ate of bitter isolation and futility, and of the still more bitter knowledge:  “George does not want me; I’m no good to him!”

Her heart, seeking consolation, went back again and again to the time when he had wanted her; but it was far to go, to the days of holland suits, when all those things that he desired—­slices of pineapple, Benson’s old carriage-whip, the daily reading out of “Tom Brown’s School-days,” the rub with Elliman when he sprained his little ankle, the tuck-up in bed—­were in her power alone to give.

This night she saw with fatal clearness that since he went to school he had never wanted her at all.  She had tried so many years to believe that he did, till it had become part of her life, as it was part of her life to say her prayers night and morning; and now she found it was all pretence.  But, lying awake, she still tried to believe it, because to that she had been bound when she brought him, firstborn, into the world.  Her other son, her daughters, she loved them too, but it was not the same thing, quite; she had never wanted them to want her, because that part of her had been given once for all to George.