“Well, mater,” he said, in a voice of factitious calm, “I’ve got it.”  He was looking up at the ceiling.

“Got what?”

“The National Scholarship.  Swynnerton says it’s a sheer fluke.  But I’ve got it.  Great glory for the Bursley School of Art!”

“National Scholarship?” she said.  “What’s that?  What is it?”

“Now, mother!” he admonished her, not without testiness.  “Don’t go and say I’ve never breathed a word about it!”

He lit a cigarette, to cover his self-consciousness, for he perceived that she was moved far beyond the ordinary.

Never, in fact, not even by the death of her husband, had she received such a frightful blow as that which the dreamy Cyril had just dealt her.

It was not a complete surprise, but it was nearly a complete surprise.  A few months previously he certainly had mentioned, in his incidental way, the subject of a National Scholarship.  Apropos of a drinking-cup which he had designed, he had said that the director of the School of Art had suggested that it was good enough to compete for the National, and that as he was otherwise qualified for the competition he might as well send the cup to South Kensington.  He had added that Peel-Swynnerton had laughed at the notion as absurd.  On that occasion she had comprehended that a National Scholarship involved residence in London.  She ought to have begun to live in fear, for Cyril had a most disturbing habit of making a mere momentary reference to matters which he deemed very important and which occupied a large share of his attention.  He was secretive by nature, and the rigidity of his father’s rule had developed this trait in his character.  But really he had spoken of the competition with such an extreme casualness that with little effort she had dismissed it from her anxieties as involving a contingency so remote as to be negligible.  She had, genuinely, almost forgotten it.  Only at rare intervals had it wakened in her a dull transitory pain—­like the herald of a fatal malady.  And, as a woman in the opening stage of disease, she had hastily reassured herself:  “How silly of me!  This can’t possibly be anything serious!”

And now she was condemned.  She knew it.  She knew there could be no appeal.  She knew that she might as usefully have besought mercy from a tiger as from her good, industrious, dreamy son.

“It means a pound a week,” said Cyril, his self-consciousness intensified by her silence and by the dreadful look on her face.  “And of course free tuition.”

“For how long?” she managed to say.

“Well,” said he, “that depends.  Nominally for a year.  But if you behave yourself it’s always continued for three years.”  If he stayed for three years he would never come back:  that was a certainty.