the Easter term; he was stroking her cat, who always went to him,
and telling her that he meant to be a sculptor, but that his guardian
objected, so that, of course, he could not start till he was of age. The
lamp on the table had a rose-coloured shade; he had been rowing--a very
cold day--and his face was glowing; generally it was rather pale. And
suddenly he smiled, and said: "It's rotten waiting for things, isn't
it?" It was then she had almost stretched out her hands to draw his
forehead to her lips. She had thought then that she wanted to kiss him,
because it would have been so nice to be his mother--she might just have
been his mother, if she had married at sixteen. But she had long known
now that she wanted to kiss, not his forehead, but his lips. He was
there in her life--a fire in a cold and unaired house; it had even
become hard to understand that she could have gone on all these years
without him. She had missed him so those six weeks of the Easter
vacation, she had revelled so in his three queer little letters,
half-shy, half-confidential; kissed them, and worn them in her dress!
And in return had written him long, perfectly correct epistles in her
still rather quaint English. She had never let him guess her feelings;
the idea that he might shocked her inexpressibly. When the summer term
began, life seemed to be all made up of thoughts of him. If, ten years
ago, her baby had lived, if its cruel death--after her agony--had not
killed for good her wish to have another; if for years now she had not
been living with the knowledge that she had no warmth to expect, and
that love was all over for her; if life in the most beautiful of all old
cities had been able to grip her--there would have been forces to check
this feeling. But there was nothing in the world to divert the current.
And she was so brimful of life, so conscious of vitality running to
sheer waste. Sometimes it had been terrific, that feeling within her,
of wanting to live--to find outlet for her energy. So many hundreds
of lonely walks she had taken during all these years, trying to lose
herself in Nature--hurrying alone, running in the woods, over the
fields, where people did not come, trying to get rid of that sense of
waste, trying once more to feel as she had felt when a girl, with the
whole world before her. It was not for nothing that her figure was
superb, her hair so bright a brown, her eyes so full of light. She
had tried many distractions. W