not pleaded for them; this year she had pleaded, but she did not long
for them. It was because she had suddenly realized the strange fact that
she did not want to leave England, and the reason for it, that she
had come and begged to go. Yet why, when it was just to get away from
thought of this boy, had she said: "Yes, I think he ought to come!" Ah!
but life for her was always a strange pull between the conscientious
and the desperate; a queer, vivid, aching business! How long was it now
since that day when he first came to lunch, silent and shy, and suddenly
smiling as if he were all lighted up within--the day when she had said
to her husband afterwards: "Ah, he's an angel!" Not yet a year--the
beginning of last October term, in fact. He was different from all the
other boys; not that he was a prodigy with untidy hair, ill-fitting
clothes, and a clever tongue; but because of something--something--Ah!
well--different; because he was--he; because she longed to take his
head between her hands and kiss it. She remembered so well the day that
longing first came to her. She was giving him tea, it was quite early
in the Easter term; he was stroking her cat, who always went to him,
and telling her that he meant to be a sculptor, but that his guardian
objected, so that, of course, he could not start till he was of age. The
lamp on the table had a rose-coloured shade; he had been rowing--a very
cold day--and his face was glowing; generally it was rather pale. And
suddenly he smiled, and said: "It's rotten waiting for things, isn't
it?" It was then she had almost stretched out her hands to draw his
forehead to her lips. She had thought then that she wanted to kiss him,
because it would have been so nice to be his mother--she might just have
been his mother, if she had married at sixteen. But she had long known
now that she wanted to kiss, not his forehead, but his lips. He was
there in her life--a fire in a cold and unaired house; it had even
become hard to understand that she could have gone on all these years
without him. She had missed him so those six weeks of the Easter