into bed.  She thought with placid anxiety, in the dark:  “I shall have to be firm with Cyril.”  And she thought also, simultaneously:  “He really must be a good boy.  He must.”  And clung to him passionately, without shame!  Lying alone there in the dark, she could be as unrestrained and girlish as her heart chose.  When she loosed her hold she instantly saw the boy’s father arranged in his coffin, or flitting about the room.  Then she would hug that vision too, for the pleasure of the pain it gave her.

III

She was reassured as to Cyril during the next few days.  He did not attempt to repeat his ingenious naughtiness of the Monday evening, and he came directly home for tea; moreover he had, as a kind of miracle performed to dazzle her, actually arisen early on the Tuesday morning and done his arithmetic.  To express her satisfaction she had manufactured a specially elaborate straw-frame for the sketch after Sir Edwin Landseer, and had hung it in her bedroom:  an honour which Cyril appreciated.  She was as happy as a woman suffering from a recent amputation can be; and compared with the long nightmare created by Samuel’s monomania and illness, her existence seemed to be now a beneficent calm.

Cyril, she thought, had realized the importance in her eyes of tea, of that evening hour and that companionship which were for her the flowering of the day.  And she had such confidence in his goodness that she would pour the boiling water on the Horniman tea-leaves even before he arrived:  certainty could not be more sure.  And then, on the Friday of the first week, he was late!  He bounded in, after dark, and the state of his clothes indicated too clearly that he had been playing football in the mud that was a grassy field in summer.

“Have you been kept in, my boy?” she asked, for the sake of form.

“No, mother,” he said casually.  “We were just kicking the ball about a bit.  Am I late?”

“Better go and tidy yourself,” she said, not replying to his question.  “You can’t sit down in that state.  And I’ll have some fresh tea made.  This is spoilt.”

“Oh, very well!”

Her sacred tea—­the institution which she wanted to hallow by long habit, and which was to count before everything with both of them —­had been carelessly sacrificed to the kicking of a football in mud!  And his father buried not ten days!  She was wounded:  a deep, clean, dangerous wound that would not bleed.  She tried to be glad that he had not lied; he might easily have lied, saying that he had been detained for a fault and could not help being late.  No!  He was not given to lying; he would lie, like any human being, when a great occasion demanded such prudence, but he was not a liar; he might fairly be called a truthful boy.  She tried to be glad, and did not succeed.  She would have preferred him to have lied.

Amy, grumbling, had to boil more water.