Dorsey's nerves were in a shocking state. You could see she had been afraid all the time; from the first day when Mamma had kept on saying, "Has Mary come back?"

Dorsy was sure that was how it began; but she couldn't tell you whether it was before or afterwards that she had forgotten the days of the week.

Anybody could forget the days of the week. What frightened Dorsy was hearing her say suddenly, "Mary's gone." She said it to herself when she didn't know Dorsy was in the room. Then she had left off asking and wondering. For five days she hadn't said anything about you. Not anything at all. When she heard your name she stared at them with a queer, scared look.

Catty said that yesterday she had begun to be afraid of Dorsy and couldn't bear her in the room. That was what made them send the wire.

* * * * *

What had she been thinking of those five days? It was as though she knew.

Dorsy said she didn't believe she was thinking anything at all. Dorsy didn't know.

II.

Somebody knew. Somebody had been talking. She had found Catty in the room making up the bed for her in the corner. Catty was crying as she tucked in the blankets. "There's some people," she said, "as had ought to be poisoned." But she wouldn't say why she was crying.

You could tell by Mr. Belk's face, his mouth drawn in between claws of nose and chin; by Mrs. Belk's face and her busy eyes, staring. By the old men sitting on the bench at the corner, their eyes coming together as you passed.

And Mr. Spencer Rollitt, stretching himself straight and looking away over your head and drawing in his breath with a "Fivv-vv-vv" when he asked how Mamma was. His thoughts were hidden behind his bare, wooden face. He was a just and cautious man. He wouldn't accept any statement outside the Bible without proof.

You had to go down and talk to Mrs. Waugh. She had come to see how you would look. Her mouth talked about Mamma but her face was saying all the time, "I'm not going to ask you what you were doing in London in Mr. Nicholson's flat, Mary. I'm sure you wouldn't do anything you'd be sorry to think of with your poor mother in the state she's in."

I don't care. I don't care what they think.

There would still be Catty and Dorsy and Louisa Wright and Miss Kendal and Dr. Charles with their kind eyes that loved you. And Richard living his eternal life in your heart.

And Mamma would never know.

III.

Mamma was going backwards and forwards between the open work-table and the cabinet. She was taking out the ivory reels and thimbles and button boxes, wrapping them in tissue paper and hiding them in the cabinet. When she had locked the doors she waited till you weren't looking to lift up her skirt and hide the key in her petticoat pocket.

She was happy, like a busy child at play.

She was never ill, only tired like a child that plays too long. Her face was growing smooth and young and pretty again; a pink flush under her eyes. She would never look disapproving or reproachful any more. She couldn't listen any more when you read aloud to her. She had forgotten how to play halma.

One day she found the green box in the cabinet drawer. She came to you carrying it with care. When she had put it down on the table she lifted the lid and looked at the little green and white pawns and smiled.

"Roddy's soldiers," she said.

* * * * *

Richard doesn't know what he's talking about when he asks me to give up Mamma. He might as well ask me to give up my child. It's no use his saying she "isn't there." Any minute she may come back and remember and know me.

She must have known me yesterday when she asked me to go and see what
Papa was doing.

As for "waiting," he may have to wait years and years. And I'm forty-five now.

IV.

The round black eye of the mirror looked at them. Their figures would be there, hers and Richard's, at the bottom of the black crystal bowl, small like the figures in the wrong end of a telescope, very clear in the deep, clear swirl of the glass.

They were sitting close together on the old rose-chintz-covered couch. Her couch. You could see him putting the cushions at her back, tucking the wide Victorian skirt in close about the feet in the black velvet slippers. And she would lie there with her poor hands folded in the white cashmere shawl.

Richard knew what you were thinking.

"You can't expect me," he was saying, "to behave like my uncle…. Besides, it's a little too late, isn't it?… We said, whatever we did we wouldn't go back on it. If it wasn't wrong then, Mary, it isn't wrong now."

"It isn't that, Richard."

(No. Not that. Pure and remorseless then. Pure and remorseless now.)

She wondered whether he had heard it. The crunching on the gravel walk under the windows, stopping suddenly when the feet stepped on to the grass. And the hushed growl of the men's voices. Baxter and the gardener. They had come to see whether the light would go out again behind the yellow blinds as it had gone out last night.

If you were a coward; if you had wanted to get off scot-free, it was too late.

Richard knows I'm not a coward. Funk wouldn't keep me from him. It isn't that.

"What is it, then?"

"Can't you see, can't you feel that it's no use coming again, just for this? It'll never be what it was then. It'll always be like last night, and you'll think I don't care. Something's holding me back from you. Something that's happened to me. I don't know yet what it is."

"Nerves. Nothing but nerves."

"No. I thought it was nerves last night. I thought it was this room.
Those two poor ghosts, looking at us. I even thought it might be Mark and
Roddy—all of them—tugging at me to get me away from you…. But it
isn't that. It's something in me."

"You're trying to tell me you don't want me."

"I'm trying to tell you what happened. I did want you, all last year. It was so awful that I had to stop it. You couldn't go on living like that…. I willed and willed not to want you."

"So did I. All the willing in the world couldn't stop me."

"It isn't that sort of willing. You might go on all your life like that and nothing would happen. You have to find it out for yourself; and even that might take you all your life…. It isn't the thing people call willing at all. It's much queerer. Awfully queer."

"How—queer?"

"Oh—the sort of queerness you don't like talking about."

"I'm sorry, Mary. You seem to be talking about something, but I haven't the faintest notion what it is. But you can make yourself believe anything you like if you keep on long enough."

"No. Half the time I'm doing it I don't believe it'll come off…. But it always does. Every time it's the same. Every time; exactly as if something had happened."

"Poor Mary."

"But, Richard, it makes you absolutely happy. That's the queer part of it. It's how you know."

"Know what?"

He was angry.

"That there's something there. That it's absolutely real."

"Real?"

"Why not? If it makes you happy without the thing you care most for in the whole world…. There must be something there. It must be real. Real in a way that nothing else is."

"You aren't happy now," he said.

"No. And you're with me. And I care for you more than anything in the whole world."

"I thought you said that was all over."

"No. It's only just begun."

"I can't say I see it."

"You'll see it all right soon…. When you've gone."

V.

It was no use not marrying him, no use sending him away, as long as he was tied to you by his want.

You had no business to be happy. It wasn't fair. There was he, tied to you tighter than if you had married him. And there you were in your inconceivable freedom. Supposing you could give him the same freedom, the same happiness? Supposing you could "work" it for him, make It (whatever it was) reach out and draw him into your immunity, your peace?

VI.

Whatever It was It was there. You could doubt away yourself and Richard, but you couldn't doubt away It.

It might leave you for a time, but it came back. It came back. Its going only intensified the wonder of its return. You might lose all sense of it between its moments; but the thing was certain while it lasted. Doubt it away, and still what had been done for you lasted. Done for you once for all, two years ago. And that wasn't the first time.

Even supposing you could doubt away the other times.—You might have made the other things happen by yourself. But not that. Not giving Richard up and still being happy. That was something you couldn't possibly have done yourself. Or you might have done it in time—time might have done it for you—but not like that, all at once, making that incredible, supernatural happiness and peace out of nothing at all, in one night, and going on in it, without Richard. Richard himself didn't believe it was possible. He simply thought it hadn't happened.

Still, even then, you might have said it didn't count so long as it was nothing but your private adventure; but not now, never again now when it had happened to Richard.

His letter didn't tell you whether he thought there was anything in it.
He saw the "queerness" of it and left it there:

"Something happened that night after you'd gone. You know how I felt. I couldn't stop wanting you. My mind was tied to you and couldn't get away. Well—that night something let go—quite suddenly. Something went.

"It's a year ago and it hasn't come back.

"I didn't know what on earth you meant by 'not wanting and still caring'; but I think I see now. I don't 'want' you any more and I 'care' more than ever….

"Don't 'work like blazes.' Still I'm glad you like it. I can get you any amount of the same thing—more than you'll care to do."

VII.

He didn't know how hard it was to "work like blazes." You had to keep your eyes ready all the time to see what Mamma was doing. You had to take her up and down stairs, holding her lest she should turn dizzy and fall. If you left her a minute she would get out of the room, out of the house and on to the Green by herself and be frightened.

Mamma couldn't remember the garden. She looked at her flowers with dislike.

You had brought her on a visit to a strange, disagreeable place and left her there. She was angry with you because she couldn't get away.

Then, suddenly, for whole hours she would be good: a child playing its delicious game of goodness. When Dr. Charles came in and you took him out of the room to talk about her you would tell her to sit still until you came back. And she would smile, the sweet, serious smile of a child that is being trusted, and sit down on the parrot chair; and when you came back you would find her sitting there, still smiling to herself because she was so good.

Why do I love her now, when she is like this—when "this" is what I was afraid of, what I thought I could not bear—why do I love her more, if anything, now than I've ever done before? Why am I happier now than I've ever been before, except in the times when I was writing and the times when I was with Richard?

VIII.

Forty-five. Yesterday she was forty-five, and to-day. To-morrow she would be forty-six. She had come through the dreadful, dangerous year without thinking of it, and nothing had happened. Nothing at all. She couldn't imagine why she had ever been afraid of it; she could hardly remember what being afraid of it had felt like.

Aunt Charlotte—Uncle Victor—

If I were going to be mad I should have gone mad long ago: when Roddy came back; when Mark died; when I sent Richard away. I should be mad now.

It was getting worse.

In the cramped room where the big bed stuck out from the wall to within a yard of the window, Mamma went about, small and weak, in her wadded lavender Japanese dressing-gown, like a child that can't sit still, looking for something it wants that nobody can find. You couldn't think because of the soft pad-pad of the dreaming, sleepwalking feet in the lamb's-wool slippers.

When you weren't looking she would slip out of the room on to the landing to the head of the stairs, and stand there, vexed and bewildered when you caught her.

IX.

Mamma was not well enough now to get up and be dressed. They had moved her into Papa's room. It was bright all morning with the sun. She was happy there. She remembered the yellow furniture. She was back in the old bedroom at Five Elms.

Mamma lay in the big bed, waiting for you to brush her hair. She was playing with her white flannel dressing jacket, spread out before her on the counterpane, ready. She talked to herself.

"Lindley Vickers—Vickers Lindley."

But she was not thinking of Lindley Vickers; she was thinking of Dan, trying to get back to Dan.

"Is Jenny there? Tell her to go and see what Master Roddy's doing." She thought Catty was Jenny…. "Has Dan come in?"

Sometimes it would be Papa; but not often; she soon left him for Dan and
Roddy.

Always Dan and Roddy. And never Mark.

Never Mark and never Mary. Had she forgotten Mark or did she remember him too well? Or was she afraid to remember? Supposing there was a black hole in her mind where Mark's death was, and another black hole where Mary had been? Had she always held you together in her mind so that you went down together? Did she hold you together now, in some time and place safer than memory?

She was still playing with the dressing-jacket. She smoothed it, and patted it, and folded it up and laid it beside her on the bed. She took up her pocket-handkerchief and shook it out and folded it and put it on the top of the dressing-jacket.

"What are you doing, you darling?"

"Going to bed."

She looked at you with a half-happy, half-frightened smile, because you had found her out. She was putting out the baby clothes, ready. Serious and pleased and frightened.

"Who will take care of my little children when I'm laid aside?"

She knew what she was lying in the big bed for.

X.

It was really bedtime. She was sitting up in the armchair while Catty who was Jenny made her bed. The long white sheet lay smooth and flat on the high mattress; it hung down on the floor.

Mamma was afraid of the white sheet. She wouldn't go back to bed.

"There's a coffin on the bed. Somebody's died of cholera," she said.

Cholera? That was what she thought Mark had died of.

* * * * *

She knows who I am now.

XI.

Richard had written to say he was married. On the twenty-fifth of
February. That was just ten days after Mamma died.

"We've known each other the best part of our lives. So you see it's a very sober middle-aged affair."

He had married the woman who loved him when he was young. "A very sober middle-aged affair." Not what it would have been if you and he—He didn't want you to think that that would ever happen again. He wanted you to see that with him and you it had been different, that you had loved him and lived with him in that other time he had made for you where you were always young.

He had only made it for you. She, poor thing, would have to put up with other people's time, time that made them middle-aged, made them old.

You had got to write and tell him you were glad. You had got to tell him Mamma died ten days ago. And he would say to himself, "If I'd waited another ten days—" There was nothing he could say to you.

That was why he didn't write again. There was nothing to say.