understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness continued to go off
after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
and the wife.

"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself and
tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the picture and he had been
carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
went about his work.

Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a