dragged up a reluctant Hamlet to sit with him, and
gazed out down into the garden that was misty now in the evening golden
light, the trees and the soil black beneath the gold, the rooks slowly
swinging across the sty above the farther side of the road. Hamlet
wriggled. He always detested that he should be cuddled, and he would
press first with one leg, then with another, against Jeremy's coat; then
he would lie dead for a moment, suddenly springing, with his head up,
in the hope that the surprise would free him; then he would turn into a
snake, twisting his body under Jeremy's arm, and dropping with a flop
on to the floor. All these manoeuvres to-day availed him nothing; Jeremy
held his neck in a vice, and dug his fingers well into the skin. Hamlet
whined, then lay still, and, in the midst of indignant reflections
against the imbecile tyrannies of man, fell, to his own surprise,
asleep.

Jeremy sat there whilst the dusk fell and all the beautiful lights were
drawn from the sky and the rooks went to bed. Rose came to draw the
curtains, and then he left his window-seat, dragged out his toy village
and pretended to play with it. He looked at his sisters. They seemed
quite tranquil. Helen was sewing, and Mary deep in "The Pillars of the
House." The clock ticked. Hamlet, lost in sleep, snored and sputtered;
the whole world pursued its ordinary way. Only in himself something was
changed; he was unhappy, and he could not account for his unhappiness.
It should have been because his mother was ill, and yet she had been ill
before, and he had been only disturbed for a moment. After all, grown-up
people always got well. There had been Aunt Amy, who had had measles,
and the wife of the Dean, who had had something, and even the Bishop
once... But now he was frightened. There was some perception, coming
to him now for the first time in his life, that this world was not
absolutely stable--that people left it, people came into it, that
there was change and danger and something stronger.... Gradually this
perception was approaching him as though it had been some dark figure
who had entered the house, and now, with muffled step and veiled face,
was slowly climbing the stairs towards him. He only knew that his mother
could not go; she could not go. She was part of his life, and she would
always be so. Why, now, when he thought of it, he could do nothing
without his mother; every day he must tell her what he had done and what
he was going