“Oh, no,” said Reuben. “So far, I have given you the benefit of the doubt. I have not whipped you yet.” “Whipped!” “A method of correction, Edward, used upon children and sometimes on those whose years outstrip their sense.” “Do you seriously picture me, sir, remaining here to be a whipping block?” “Children run away: and children are brought back.” Her moment! Oh, it was slipping from her as they squabbled, Edward’s future was at stake, and not his alone. If young Tom Hepplestall was for the army, there were still her younger sons; there were Edward’s own unborn sons. The stake was not Edward’s future only, it was the future of the Hepplestalls and all her landed instincts were in revolt against the thought that her sons were to follow Reuben in his excursion, his strange variation, from the type she knew. Once his factory had seemed mysterious and romantic. Now, she was facing it, she was seeing it through Edward’s outraged eyes. Incredible mercy that she had not seen it before, but not incredible in the light of her love for Reuben. It had been a thing apart from her life and now, implacably, was come into it. There was no evading the factory now; there was no facile blinking at it as a dark place in Reuben’s life about which she could be incurious, it was claiming her Edward, it had come, through him, into her life now. It was crouching for her, like a beast in the jungle and what was to happen when the beast sprang, to her, to Reuben, to their love? She had held aloof from the factory and she had kept Reuben’s love. Were these cause and effect and was her aloofness a condition of his love? Was her hold on him the hold of one consenting to be a decoration, and no more than a decoration in his life? Had she shied from facts all these years, and was retribution at hand? These were desperate questionings, but Edward was her son and she must take her risks for him, even this risk imperiling her all, this so much greater risk than the life she risked for him when he was born. But when to speak? When to put all to the test? Surely not just now when this pair of men, one calling the other “child,” both, one as bully, the other as Gasconader, were behaving like children. She groped helplessly for her moment. Then, suddenly, as she seemed to drown in deep water and to clutch feebly upwards, she knew that her moment was come. She had not heard the sound of the shot coming from the shrubbery and felt no pain. She only knew that she was weak, that her moment, safely, surely, was come, and that she must use it quickly.