ys. When he had sat out under the cedar
in the evenings she had often noticed him writing with a pencil though
she had never thought to enquire what he was doing. Now, with a chance
curiosity, she happened to open one of these books and examine what he
had written. She saw at once that they were verses, and laughed at the
idea. But when she had read one or two of his poems she laughed no
longer. She realised at once that they were love-poems, feeble and
amateurish in their expression, but daringly sensual and passionate in
their content. They made the good woman blush--her husband had never
been so direct in his days of courtship--but to her blushes succeeded a
moment of fierce maternal alarm. It was impossible, she thought, that
anyone innocent of a violent sexual passion could have conceived the
ideas that the verses contained. They were fully as physical, and
nearly as direct, as the love-songs of Herrick. She was not only
shocked, but frightened, for her long years of widowhood had isolated
her from all feelings of the kind that Arthur expressed so glibly. She
read the poems over again and again. She could not sleep at night for
thinking of them. In the end she became convinced that the thing which
she had feared most had come to pass; that even if the coming of
manhood had brought to Arthur the birth of a moral sense in matters of
ordinary social intercourse, the gain had been neutralised by the
release of a new instinct that was powerful enough to wreck the rest.
The boy was obviously and violently in love--not with any shadowy
dreamed ideal, but actually with a woman of definite physical
attributes. It was almost possible to reconstruct a picture from the
poems. A skin of ivory, grey eyes, hair that was like night, red lips,
pale hands, all rather commonplace, but, none the less, damningly
definite.

It is curious that the image of Gabrielle never suggested itself to
her. Perhaps it was the fact that Arthur, for some unaccountable
reason, probably because he usually saw them in a half-light, had made
her violet eyes--an unmistakable feature--grey. As the matter stood
Mrs. Payne was convinced that he had become entangled, and intimately
entangled, with some dangerous and designing woman. It was her plain
duty to save him. The only thing that restrained her from immediate
action was the fear that any big emotional disturbance might undo the
work that Considine had already accomplished. She didn't