ceiling from the lamps that swung in the hands of the
colliers tramping by outside, going to take the nine o'clock shift. They
listened to the voices of the men, imagined them dipping down into the
dark valley. Sometimes they went to the window and watched the three
or four lamps growing tinier and tinier, swaying down the fields in the
darkness. Then it was a joy to rush back to bed and cuddle closely in
the warmth.

Paul was rather a delicate boy, subject to bronchitis. The others were
all quite strong; so this was another reason for his mother's difference
in feeling for him. One day he came home at dinner-time feeling ill. But
it was not a family to make any fuss.

"What's the matter with YOU?" his mother asked sharply.

"Nothing," he replied.

But he ate no dinner.

"If you eat no dinner, you're not going to school," she said.

"Why?" he asked.

"That's why."

So after dinner he lay down on the sofa, on the warm chintz cushions the
children loved. Then he fell into a kind of doze. That afternoon Mrs.
Morel was ironing. She listened to the small, restless noise the boy
made in his throat as she worked. Again rose in her heart the old,
almost weary feeling towards him. She had never expected him to live.
And yet he had a great vitality in his young body. Perhaps it would have
been a little relief to her if he had died. She always felt a mixture of
anguish in her love for him.

He, in his semi-conscious sleep, was vaguely aware of the clatter of the
iron on the iron-stand, of the faint thud, thud on the ironing-board.
Once roused, he opened his eyes to see his mother standing on the
hearthrug with the hot iron near her cheek, listening, as it were, to
the heat. Her still face, with the mouth closed tight from suffering and
disillusion and self-denial, and her nose the smallest bit on one side,
and her blue eyes so young, quick, and warm, made his heart contract
with love. When she was quiet, so, she looked brave and rich with life,
but as if she had been done out of her rights. It hurt the boy keenly,
this feeling about her that she had never had her life's fulfilment:
and his own incapability to make up to her hurt him with a sense of
impotence, yet made him patiently dogged inside. It was his childish
aim.

She spat on the iron, and a little ball of spit bounded, raced off the
dark, glossy surface. Then, kneeling, she rubbed the iron on the sack
lining of the hearthrug vigorously. She was warm in the ru