“N—­no, Mr. Cyril,” she blubbered.

“Amy!” Constance sharply corrected her, as Cyril ran upstairs, “I wonder you can’t control yourself better than that.”

Amy weakly apologized.  Although treated almost as one of the family, she ought not to have forgotten that she was a servant.  What right had she to weep over Cyril’s luggage?  This question was put to her in Constance’s tone.

The cab came.  Cyril tumbled downstairs with exaggerated carelessness, and with exaggerated carelessness he joked at the cabman.

“Now, mother!” he cried, when the luggage was stowed.  “Do you want me to miss this train?” But he knew that the margin of time was ample.  It was his fun!

“Nay, I can’t be hurried!” she said, fixing her bonnet.  “Amy, as soon as we are gone you can clear this table.”

She climbed heavily into the cab.

“That’s it!  Smash the springs!” Cyril teased her.

The horse got a stinging cut to recall him to the seriousness of life.  It was a fine, bracing autumn morning, and the driver felt the need of communicating his abundant energy to some one or something.  They drove off, Amy staring after them from the door.  Matters had been so marvellously well arranged that they arrived at the station twenty minutes before the train was due.

“Never mind!” Cyril mockingly comforted his mother.  “You’d rather be twenty minutes too soon than one minute too late, wouldn’t you?”

His high spirits had to come out somehow.

Gradually the minutes passed, and the empty slate-tinted platform became dotted with people to whom that train was nothing but a Loop Line train, people who took that train every week-day of their lives and knew all its eccentricities.

And they heard the train whistle as it started from Turnhill.  And Cyril had a final word with the porter who was in charge of the luggage.  He made a handsome figure, and he had twenty pounds in his pocket.  When he returned to Constance she was sniffing, and through her veil he could see that her eyes were circled with red.  But through her veil she could see nothing.  The train rolled in, rattling to a standstill.  Constance lifted her veil and kissed him; and kissed her life out.  He smelt the odour of her crape.  He was, for an instant, close to her, close; and he seemed to have an overwhelmingly intimate glimpse into her secrets; he seemed to be choked in the sudden strong emotion of that crape.  He felt queer.

“Here you are, sir!  Second smoker!” called the porter.

The daily frequenters of the train boarded it with their customary disgust.

“I’ll write as soon as ever I get there!” said Cyril, of his own accord.  It was the best he could muster.

With what grace he raised his hat!

A sliding-away; clouds of steam; and she shared the dead platform with milk-cans, two porters, and Smith’s noisy boy!

She walked home, very slowly and painfully.  The lump of lead was heavier than ever before.  And the townspeople saw the proudest mother in Bursley walking home.