During the six months that had elapsed since her visit to Miss Fenno she had been conscious of a pain of which she had supposed herself no longer capable:  as a man will continue to feel the ache of an amputated arm.  She had fancied that all her centres of feeling had been transferred to Alan; but she now found herself subject to a kind of dual suffering, in which her individual pang was the keener in that it divided her from her son’s.  Alan had surprised her:  she had not foreseen that he would take a sentimental rebuff so hard.  His disappointment took the uncommunicative form of a sterner application to work.  He threw himself into the concerns of the Radiator with an aggressiveness that almost betrayed itself in the paper.  Mrs. Quentin never read the Radiator, but from the glimpses of it reflected in the other journals she gathered that it was at least not being subjected to the moral reconstruction which had been one of Miss Fenno’s alternatives.

Mrs. Quentin never spoke to her son of what had happened.  She was superior to the cheap satisfaction of avenging his injury by depreciating its cause.  She knew that in sentimental sorrows such consolations are as salt in the wound.  The avoidance of a subject so vividly present to both could not but affect the closeness of their relation.  An invisible presence hampered their liberty of speech and thought.  The girl was always between them; and to hide the sense of her intrusion they began to be less frequently together.  It was then that Mrs. Quentin measured the extent of her isolation.  Had she ever dared to forecast such a situation, she would have proceeded on the conventional theory that her son’s suffering must draw her nearer to him; and this was precisely the relief that was denied her.  Alan’s uncommunicativeness extended below the level of speech, and his mother, reduced to the helplessness of dead-reckoning, had not even the solace of adapting her sympathy to his needs.  She did not know what he felt:  his course was incalculable to her.  She sometimes wondered if she had become as incomprehensible to him; and it was to find a moment’s refuge from the dogging misery of such conjectures that she had now turned in at the Museum.

The long line of mellow canvases seemed to receive her into the rich calm of an autumn twilight.  She might have been walking in an enchanted wood where the footfall of care never sounded.  So deep was the sense of seclusion that, as she turned from her prolonged communion with the new Beltraffio, it was a surprise to find she was not alone.

A young lady who had risen from the central ottoman stood in suspended flight as Mrs. Quentin faced her.  The older woman was the first to regain her self-possession.

“Miss Fenno!” she said.

The girl advanced with a blush.  As it faded, Mrs. Quentin noticed a change in her.  There had always been something bright and bannerlike in her aspect, but now her look drooped, and she hung at half-mast, as it were.  Mrs. Quentin, in the embarrassment of surprising a secret that its possessor was doubtless unconscious of betraying, reverted hurriedly to the Beltraffio.