"Dangerous!" flashed the girl. "So you think I'm a coward, too!" "I don't, I don't," pleaded the other. "But I don't want you to." Boy put her hand on the old lady's knee. Her mother and Mr. Haggard were the only two human beings to whom she ever demonstrated affection. "Will you promise me?" said the mother. "No," answered Boy. Mrs. Woodburn tried to rise, but the girl held her down. "Sit down, mother, please. You never come and see me up here." Her eyes devoured her mother's face hungrily and with unlaughing eyes. "Kiss me, mother," she ordered. Mrs. Woodburn refrained. "Kiss me, mother," sternly. The mother obeyed. "Shall you?" she asked. "I shan't say," replied Boy. She rose and went to the window. Outside under the wood Mr. Silver, pipe in mouth, was sauntering round Ragamuffin's grave. "He said I was afraid!" she muttered. * * * * * When her mother left the room, the girl went to the window. The gallop had kindled in her for the moment the flame of her old ambition; but the desire had died down swiftly as it had risen. Boy knew now that she no longer really wanted to ride the Grand National Winner. She wanted something else--fiercely. Cautiously she peeped out of the window. Mr. Silver, in that old green golf-jacket of his, that clung so finely to his clean shoulders, was prowling along the edge of the wood close to Ragamuffin's grave, peeping for early nests. The girl remembered that it was St. Valentine's--the day birds mate. She turned away. BOOK V MONKEY BRAND CHAPTER XXXV The Dancer's Son Sebastian Bach Joses was the son of an artist of Portuguese extraction. The artist was a waster and a wanderer. In his youth he mated with a Marseillaise dancing-girl who had posed as his model. Joses had been the result. The father shortly deserted the mother, who took to the music-hall stage. After a brief and somewhat lurid career on the halls in London and elsewhere she died. The lad had as little chance as a human being can have. As a boy, with the red-gold mass of hair he inherited from his mother, and a certain farouche air, he had been attractive, especially to women. Clever, alert, and sensitive, brought up in a Bohemian set, without money, or morals, or the steadying factor of position, he had early acquired all the tricks of the artist, the parasite, and the adventurer. He could play the guitar quite prettily, could sing a song, dabbled with pen and brush, and talked with considerable facility of poetry and art. An old-time admirer of his mother's, on whom that lady when dying had fathered the boy, paid for the lad's keep as a child. Later, attracted by the boy's beauty, and secretly proud of his putative share in it, he had sent him to a college in a south coast watering place and afterward to Oxford.