every right," he said. "I wasn't heeding you. I only thought of my
mother, and the fact that there was a very dear friend by me. And then I
came to myself: I remembered who the friend was."

They stood there in silence, apart, for a moment. Then Michael came
closer. The desire for human sympathy, and that the sympathy he most
longed for, gripped him again.

"I'm a brute," he said. "It was awfully nice of you to--to offer me
that. I accept it so gladly. I'm wretchedly anxious."

He looked up at her.

"Take my arm again," he said.

She felt the crook of his elbow tighten again on her wrist. She had not
known before how much she prized that.

"But are you sure you are right in being anxious, Mike?" she asked.
"Isn't it perhaps your own tired nerves that make you anxious?"

"I don't think so," he said. "I've been tired a long time, you see,
and I never felt about my mother like this. She has been so bright and
content all day, and yet there were little lapses, if you understand.
It was as if she knew: she said good-bye to the lake and the jolly
moor-hens and the grass. And her nurse thinks so, too. She called me out
of the room just now to tell me that. . . . I don't know why I should
tell you these depressing things."

"Don't you?" she asked. "But I do. It's because you know I care.
Otherwise you wouldn't tell me: you couldn't."

For a moment the balance quavered in his mind between Sylvia the beloved
and Sylvia the friend. It inclined to the friend.

"Yes, that's why," he said. "And I reproach myself, you know. All these
years I might, if I had tried harder, have been something to my mother.
I might have managed it. I thought--at least I felt--that she didn't
encourage me. But I was a beast to have been discouraged. And now her
wanting me has come just when it isn't her unclouded self that wants me.
It's as if--as if it had been raining all day, and just on sunset there
comes a gleam in the west. And so soon after it's night."

"You made the gleam," said Sylvia.

"But so late; so awfully late."

Suddenly he stood stiff, listening to some sound which at present
she did not hear. It sounded a little louder, and her ears caught the
running of footsteps on the stairs outside. Next moment the door opened,
and Lady Ashbridge's maid put in a pale face.

"Will you go to her ladyship, my lord?" she said. "Her nurse wants you.
She told me to telephone to Sir James."

Sylvia moved with him, not disengaging her arm,