“Your flowers are dead, my darling,” she said.  “I must get you some fresh!”

Not till then did she look at George.  There were circles under his eyes; his face was yellow; it seemed to her that it had shrunk.  This terrified her, and she thought: 

‘I must show nothing; I must keep my head!’

She was afraid—­afraid of something desperate in his face, of something desperate and headlong, and she was afraid of his stubbornness, the dumb, unthinking stubbornness that holds to what has been because it has been, that holds to its own when its own is dead.  She had so little of this quality herself that she could not divine where it might lead him; but she had lived in the midst of it all her married life, and it seemed natural that her son should be in danger from it now.

Her terror called up her self-possession.  She drew George down on the sofa by her side, and the thought flashed through her:  ’How many times has he not sat here with that woman in his arms!’

“You didn’t come for me last night, dear!  I got the tickets, such good ones!”

George smiled.

“No,” he said; “I had something else to see to!”

At sight of that smile Margery Pendyce’s heart beat till she felt sick, but she, too, smiled.

“What a nice place you have here, darling!”

“There’s room to walk about.”

Mrs. Pendyce remembered the sound she had heard of pacing to and fro.  From his not asking her how she had found out where he lived she knew that he must have guessed where she had been, that there was nothing for either of them to tell the other.  And though this was a relief, it added to her terror—­the terror of that which is desperate.  All sorts of images passed through her mind.  She saw George back in her bedroom after his first run with the hounds, his chubby cheek scratched from forehead to jaw, and the bloodstained pad of a cub fox in his little gloved hand.  She saw him sauntering into her room the last day of the 1880 match at Lord’s, with a battered top-hat, a blackened eye, and a cane with a light-blue tassel.  She saw him deadly pale with tightened lips that afternoon after he had escaped from her, half cured of laryngitis, and stolen out shooting by himself, and she remembered his words:  “Well, Mother, I couldn’t stand it any longer; it was too beastly slow!”

Suppose he could not stand it now!  Suppose he should do something rash!  She took out her handkerchief.

“It’s very hot in here, dear; your forehead is quite wet!”

She saw his eyes turn on her suspiciously, and all her woman’s wit stole into her own eyes, so that they did not flicker, but looked at him with matter-of-fact concern.

“That skylight is what does it,” he said.  “The sun gets full on there.”

Mrs. Pendyce looked at the skylight.

“It seems odd to see you here, dear, but it’s very nice—­so unconventional.  You must let me put away those poor flowers!” She went to the silver cup and bent over them.  “My dear boy, they’re quite nasty!  Do throw them outside somewhere; it’s so dreadful, the smell of old flowers!”