‘L.  TEW.’

‘Good little girl!’ he said to himself, smiling sadly.  ’I feel sure she did her best.’

But his pride was asserting itself, always restive under provocation.  To rival with a man like Mutimer!  Better that the severance with old days should be complete.

He talked it all over very frankly with his mother, who felt that her son’s destiny was not easily foreseen.

‘And what do you propose to do, Hubert?’ she asked, when they spoke of the future. i88 Demos

‘To study, principally art.  In a fortnight I go to Rome.’

Mrs. Eldon had gone thither thirty years ago.

‘Think of me in. my chair sometimes,’ she said, touching his hands with her wan fingers.

CHAPTER XVI

Alice reached home again on Christmas Eve.  It was snowing; she came in chilled and looking miserable.  Mrs. Mutimer met her in the hall, passed her, and looked out at the open door, then turned with a few white flecks on her gown.

’Where’s Dick?

‘He couldn’t come,’ replied the girl briefly, and ran up to her room.

’Arry was spending the evening with friends.  Since tea-time the old woman had never ceased moving from room to room, up and down stairs.  She had got out an old pair of Richard’s slippers, and had put them before the dining-room fire to warm.  She had made a bed for Richard, and had a fire burning in the chamber.  She had made arrangements for her eldest son’s supper.  No word had come from Wanley, but she held to the conviction that this night would see Richard in London.

Alice came down and declared that she was very hungry.  Her mother went to the kitchen to order a meal, which in the end she prepared with her own hands.  She seemed to have a difficulty in addressing any one.  Whilst Alice ate in silence, Mrs. Mutimer kept going in and out of the room; when the girl rose from the table, she stood before her and asked: 

‘Why couldn’t he come?’

Alice went to the fireplace, knelt down, and spread her hands to. the blaze.  Her mother approached her again.

‘Won’t you give me no answer, Alice?’

‘He couldn’t come, mother.  Something important is keeping him.’

‘Something important?  And why did he want you there?’

Alice rose to her feet, made one false beginning, then spoke to the point.

‘Dick’s married, mother.’

The old woman’s eyes seemed to grow small in her wrinkled face, as if directing themselves with effort upon something minute.  They looked straight into the eyes of her daughter, but had a more distant focus.  The fixed gaze continued for nearly a minute.

‘What are you talking about, girl?’ she said at length, in a strange, rattling voice.  ’Why, I’ve seen Emma this very morning.  Do you think she wouldn’t ‘a told me if she’d been a wife?’

Alice was frightened by the look and the voice.