ned the door
and let in sounds of argument, she was surprised, for she knew no one so
intimately that they would be likely to call at such an hour; but when
Edward too leapt up, and went out and stayed out and failed to answer
her repeated calls, she was first astonished, then indignant, and then
suddenly was overcome by a cold foreboding.

Mrs. Twist often had forebodings, and they were always cold. They seized
her with bleak fingers; and one of Edith's chief functions was to
comfort and reassure her for as long a while each time as was required
to reach the stage of being able to shake them off. Here was one,
however, too icily convincing to be shaken off. It fell upon her with
the swiftness of a revelation. Something unpleasant was going to happen
to her; something perhaps worse than unpleasant,--disastrous. And
something immediate.

Those excited voices out in the hall,--they were young, surely, and they
were feminine. Also they sounded most intimate with Edward. What had he
been concealing from her? What disgracefulness had penetrated through
him, through the son the neighbourhood thought so much of, into her very
home? She was a widow. He was her only son. Impossible to believe he
would betray so sacred a position, that he whom she had so lovingly and
proudly welcomed a few hours before would allow his--well, she really
didn't know what to call them, but anyhow female friends of whom she had
been told nothing, to enter that place which to every decent human being
is inviolable, his mother's home. Yet Mrs. Twist did instantly believe
it.

Then Edward's voice, raised and defiant--surely defiant?--came through
the crack in the door, and every word he said was quite distinct. Anna;
supper; affection ... Mrs. Twist sat frozen. And then the door was
flung open and Edward tumultuously entered, his ears crimson, his face
as she had never seen it and in each hand, held tightly by the arm, a
girl.

Edward had been deceiving her.

"Mother--" he began.

"How do you do," said the girls together, and actually with smiles.

Edward had been deceiving her. That whole afternoon how quiet he had
been, how listless. Quite gentle, quite affectionate, but listless and
untalkative. She had thought he must be tired; worn out with his long
journey across from Europe. She had made allowances for him; been
sympathetic, been considerate. And look at him now. Never had she seen
him with a face like that. He was--Mrs. Twist groped for