iffly out of their reach.

She remembered how her mother's fingers, slender and silk-skinned and
loving, had done just that, and how their touch went thrilling through
the back of her neck, how it made her heart beat. Mrs. Fielding's
fingers didn't thrill you, they were blunt and fumbling. Anne thought:
"She's no business to touch me like that. No business to think she can
do what mother did."

She was always doing it, always trying to be a mother to her. Her father
had told her she was going to try. And Anne wouldn't let her. She would
not let her.

"Why do you move your head away, darling?"

Anne didn't answer.

"You used to love it. You used to come bending your funny little neck
and turning first one ear and than the other. Like a little cat. And now
you won't let me touch you."

"No. No. Not--like that."

"Yes. Yes. Like this. You don't remember."

"I _do_ remember."

She felt the blunt fingers on her neck again and started up. The
beautiful, wilful woman lay back on her cushions, smiling to herself.

"You're a funny little thing, aren't you?" she said.

Anne's eyes were glassed. She shook her head fiercely and spilled tears.

Jerrold had come up on to the terrace. Colin trotted after him. They
were looking at her. Eliot had raised his head from his book and was
looking at her.

"It _is_ rotten of you, mater," he said, "to tease that kid."

"I'm not teasing her. Really, Eliot, you do say things--as if nobody but
yourself had any sense. You can run away now, Anne darling."

Anne stood staring, with wild animal eyes that saw no place to run to.

It was Jerrold who saved her.

"I say, would you like to see my new buck rabbit?"

"Rather!"

He held out his hand and she ran on with him, along the terrace, down
the steps at the corner and up the drive to the stable yard where the
rabbits were. Colin followed headlong.

And as she went Anne heard Eliot saying, "I've sense enough to remember
that her mother's dead."

In his worst tempers there was always some fierce pity.

iii

Mrs. Fielding gathered herself together and rose, with dignity, still
smiling. It was a smile of great sweetness, infinitely remote from all
discussion.

"It's much too hot here," she said. "You might move the cushions down
there under the beech-tree."

That, Eliot put it to himself, was just her way of getting out of it. To
Eliot the irritating thing about his mother was her dexterity in getting
out. She never los