make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old
enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you
miscall--that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed
in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her
inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of
the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to
each other, like other mothers and sons?

He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right,
mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false
brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in
town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything
really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got
lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with
her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult
to get."

"Ah, jewellery," she said.

"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented,
unconscious of her irony.

Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen,
that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and
would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you,
they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to
give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for
certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The
heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are
no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well
with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was
not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her
son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise
ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the
house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling
under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be
lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still
suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's
misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but
lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who
sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So
it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as lov