His death was an amputation for her.  But she faced it with calmness.  She was not bowed with sorrow.  She did not nurse the idea that her life was at an end; on the contrary, she obstinately put it away from her, dwelling on Cyril.  She did not indulge in the enervating voluptuousness of grief.  She had begun in the first hours of bereavement by picturing herself as one marked out for the blows of fate.  She had lost her father and her mother, and now her husband.  Her career seemed to be punctuated by interments.  But after a while her gentle commonsense came to insist that most human beings lose their parents, and that every marriage must end in either a widower or a widow, and that all careers are punctuated by interments.  Had she not had nearly twenty-one years of happy married life? (Twenty-one years—­rolled up!  The sudden thought of their naive ignorance of life, hers and his, when they were first married, brought tears into her eyes.  How wise and experienced she was now!) And had she not Cyril?  Compared to many women, she was indeed very fortunate.

The one visitation which had been specially hers was the disappearance of Sophia.  And yet even that was not worse than the death outright of Sophia, was perhaps not so bad.  For Sophia might return out of the darkness.  The blow of Sophia’s flight had seemed unique when it was fresh, and long afterwards; had seemed to separate the Baines family from all other families in a particular shame.  But at the age of forty-three Constance had learnt that such events are not uncommon in families, and strange sequels to them not unknown.  Thinking often of Sophia, she hoped wildly and frequently.

She looked at the clock; she had a little spasm of nervousness lest Cyril might fail to keep his word on that first day of their new regular life together.  And at the instant he burst into the room, invading it like an armed force, having previously laid waste the shop in his passage.

“I’m not late, mother!  I’m not late!” he cried proudly.

She smiled warmly, happy in him, drawing out of him balm and solace.  He did not know that in that stout familiar body before him was a sensitive, trembling soul that clutched at him ecstatically as the one reality in the universe.  He did not know that that evening meal, partaken of without hurry after school had released him to her, was to be the ceremonial sign of their intimate unity and their interdependence, a tender and delicious proof that they were ‘all in all to each other’:  he saw only his tea, for which he was hungry—­just as hungry as though his father were not scarcely yet cold in the grave.

But he saw obscurely that the occasion demanded something not quite ordinary, and so exerted himself to be boyishly charming to his mother.  She said to herself ‘how good he was.’  He felt at ease and confident in the future, because he detected beneath her customary judicial, impartial mask a clear desire to spoil him.