ing? I've been like a chap in a dream. I'm not awake
yet."

All that he had said to the girl was a simple fact. He had exaggerated
nothing. If, in what now seemed that long-ago past, he had not been a
sturdy, normal little lad surrounded by love and friendliness, with his
days full of healthy play and pleasure, the child tragedy of their being
torn apart might have left ugly marks upon his mind, and lurked there, a
morbid memory. And though, in time, rebellion and suffering had died
away, he had never really forgotten. Even to the cricket-playing,
larking boy at Eton there had now and then returned, with queer
suddenness, recollections which gave him odd moments of resurrected
misery. They passed away, but at long intervals they came back and
always with absolute reality. At Oxford the intervals had been longer
but a certain picture was one whose haunting never lost its clearness.
It was a vision of a colour-warm child kneeling on the grass, her eyes
uplifted, expressing only a lonely patience, and he could actually hear
her humble little voice as she said:

"I--I haven't anything." And it always roused him to rage.

Then there was the piteous break in her voice when she hid her eyes with
her arm and said of her beast of a mother:

"She--doesn't _like_ me!"

"Damn! Damn!" he used to say every time the thing came back. "Oh!
damn!--damn!" And the expletive never varied in its spontaneity.

* * * * *

As he walked under the primrose sky and breathed in the faint fragrant
stir of the freshening morning air, he who had always felt joyously the
sense of life knew more than ever before the keen rapture of living. The
springing lightness of his own step as it rang on the pavement was part
of it. It was as though he were still dancing and he almost felt
something warm and light in his arm and saw a little head of dark silk
near his breast.

Throughout his life he had taken all his joys to his closest companion
and nearest intimate--his mother. Theirs had not been a common life
together. He had not even tried to explain to himself the harmony and
gaiety of their nearness in which there seemed no separation of years.
She had drawn and held him to the wonder of her charm and had been the
fine flavour of his existence. It was actually true that he had so far
had no boyish love affairs because he had all unconsciously been in love
with the beautiful completeness of her.

Always when he return