the wrong moment to make the request. His want of readiness might even be
due to the wish to conceal from her how far his friend had surpassed him.
She knew his sensitiveness on this point, and reproached herself for not
having foreseen it. But her own arguments failed to convince her. Deep
beneath her love for her boy and her faith in him there lurked a nameless
doubt. She could hardly now, in looking back, define the impulse upon which
she had married Denis Peyton: she knew only that the deeps of her nature
had been loosened, and that she had been borne forward on their current
to the very fate from which her heart recoiled. But if in one sense her
marriage remained a problem, there was another in which her motherhood
seemed to solve it. She had never lost the sense of having snatched her
child from some dim peril which still lurked and hovered; and he became
more closely hers with every effort of her vigilant love. For the act
of rescue had not been accomplished once and for all in the moment
of immolation: it had not been by a sudden stroke of heroism, but by
ever-renewed and indefatigable effort, that she had built up for him the
miraculous shelter of her love. And now that it stood there, a hallowed
refuge against failure, she could not even set a light in the pane, but
must let him grope his way to it unaided.


V

Mrs. Peyton's midnight musings summed themselves up in the conclusion that
the next few hours would end her uncertainty. She felt the day to be
decisive. If Dick offered to show her the drawings, her fears would be
proved groundless; if he avoided the subject, they were justified.

She dressed early in order not to miss him at breakfast; but as she entered
the dining-room the parlour-maid told her that Mr. Peyton had overslept