Julia Cavendish--having ascertained from her latest vis-À-vis, a burly cattle-dealer in brown leggings and a black bowler hat, that her journey at last neared its destination--closed the novel she had been pretending to read, straightened her hat, and prepared to meet both culprits with stern Victorian condescension.

That Aliette would not accompany Ronnie to the station did not cross his mother's mind. All the way down from Waterloo she had been apprehensive, doubtful of her own rectitude, conscious of a growing antagonism toward "that woman." "That woman," of course, would be furious at the interruption of her amour.

Even the prospect of seeing Ronnie once more could not lighten the cloud of jealousy and self-distrust which Julia felt hovering--like evil birds--about her head. Viewed in retrospect, the five hours of journeying were a nightmare. Viewed prospectively, arrival would be the ugliest of awakenings. She felt ill; ill and old and out-of-date.

But the first glimpse of her son sent all Julia's evil birds flying. As the train steamed in, she saw him craning his eyes at its windows; saw that he was alone, that he was sun-bronzed, flanneled like a schoolboy. Her heart thumped--painfully, joyfully--at the knowledge that he had espied her, that he was loping along after her carriage, just as she remembered him loping along the platform at Winchester, in his cricket-flannels, twenty years ago. Then the train stopped; and he swung the carriage door open, handed her out.

"My luggage----" began Julia; but got no further with the sentence; because Ronnie, her Ronnie, who had never, even as a boy, caressed his mother in public, just put an arm round her shoulders and, kissing her, whispered: "By jingo, mater, it is ripping to see you."

A porter got her trunk and her handbag out of the train. Another porter put them into the pony-cart. Julia, for once in her life, forgot to thank them. Tears, tears she dared not shed, twitched her wrinkled eyelids; her mouth had dried up; her thin knees tottered. She could only cling, cling with all the strength of one weak arm, to Ronnie. He was her son, her only son--and she, in her stupid pride, had thought to let prejudice come between them. Her jealousy of "that woman" disappeared. The happiness, the health, the rejuvenation of Ronnie were sufficient justification, in her eyes, for Aliette. No worthless woman could have put those sunny words into her boy's mouth, that sun-bronze on his cheeks!

Ronnie, too, was moved almost to tears. The first sight of his mother, reacting on the emotions of the past weeks, struck him to consciousness of his love for her. She needed his protection more than ever before. She looked so frail, so suffering. She had suffered--because of him, because of Aliette. His heart went out to both women--in pity, in self-condemnation.

He helped her into the trap (it no longer surprised her to find they were alone) and said: "I'm afraid it's not very comfortable. That cushion's for your back. We'll have some tea at the Arms before we start."

She managed to answer: "Yes, dear. I think I would like some tea." To herself she said: "I wonder which of them thought about giving me tea, about bringing this cushion."

Ronnie clambered up; took the reins; and tipped the porters. In silence, they drove to the inn.

There the hot tea and the hot buttered toast, which he coaxed her to eat, brought back a little of Julia's courage; but the waitress, popping--eager-faced at sight of strangers--in and out of the coffee-room, made free speech impossible. Perforce they confined conversation to generalities. He, she said, "looked extraordinarily well." She, he said, "looked the least bit tired." The lunch on the train, she told him, had been "execrable." The drive to the Cove, he told her, was a "good eight miles" and they would have to "take things easy" because of the luggage. Ought they, he asked, to have ordered her a car? Oh, no--she smiled, she preferred the trap: it would give them more time to talk.

"I rather expected you'd bring Smithers," mentioned Ronnie.

"I didn't think a maid--advisable," declared Julia.

He paid for her tea, and they set off again--each silently uncertain of the other, each silently and socially constrained. But at last, as they drew clear of the town, Julia conquered constraint.

"And how is Aliette?" she asked quietly.

All the way down in the train she had intended to speak both to and of "that woman" as "Mrs. Brunton"; but since seeing Ronnie she knew that she could never even think in terms of "Mrs. Brunton" or of "that woman" again. Sinner in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the mother whose boy she had made so happy, Hector Brunton's guilty wife was already a saint.

"Quite well." His quietness matched her own.

"I'm glad."

And suddenly, impetuously, he burst out:

"Mater, she's so wonderful."

Now mother and son were alone in a world of sky and heather; and the brown pony, as though aware of impending confidences, slowed to a walk. She put a tremulous hand on his driving arm.

"Tell me--the whole story," said Julia.

His fingers loosed the reins; and that afternoon, as the brown pony ambled toward the sea, he told her the full tale of his love for Aliette, of his love for both of them: till, listening, it seemed to Julia Cavendish as though never before had she understood the heart of her son.

And that afternoon, for the first time in all her sixty years, she--whose lifelong struggle had been to cramp life in the bonds of formal religion--saw that formal religion at its very highest could only be a code for slaves, for the weak and the ignorant. For the soul of a free individual, for the strong and the wise of the earth, no formalities--whether of religion, of law, or of social observances--could exist.

The individual souls of the wise and the strong brooked no earthly master. Lonely arbiters of heaven and of hell, their own gods, their own priests and lawgivers, only love could control them, only conscience guide.

Ignorantly, blindly, she, Julia Cavendish, had sought to fetter the free souls, the wise and the strong. And behold! in the very person of her own son they had broken loose from her fetters. Ronnie, her own dearly-beloved son, was of the free! All that her formal religion had preached him wrong, love had shown him to be right; and with love had come both strength and wisdom, so that he had followed his conscience into the freedom which her ignorance would have denied him.

For that Ronnie's conscience was as clear, as limpid-clear of sin as it had been in boyhood, Julia--listening to him--could not doubt. Nor, hugging that certainty, could she doubt Aliette. Love was justified of both by the sheer test of happiness. As well accuse the birds of deadly sin as these two who, moved by an impulse so overwhelming that to deny it would have been a denial of their very natures, had--mated.