She had never realised before how deeply, how horribly she cared. It was something almost wild and savage in her, so that she, an old lady with white hair and a benevolent manner, would have fought and killed and torn his enemies were he in danger. The wildness, the ferocity of it frightened her so that she sat there in the dark with trembling hands, watching the lights of the ships at sea and, blindly, blindly praying. She had known, of course, before, that he was everything to her, that without him life would lose all its purpose and meaning and beauty, but there had been other things that counted as well; now it seemed that nothing else mattered in the least. And the second thing that she saw, and it was this second revelation that had shown her the first, was that she was in danger of losing him. The relationship of perfect confidence that had, she fondly imagined, existed until now between them, had never been endangered, because there had been nothing to hide. He had not told her everything, of course; there must have been things at Oxford, and even before, that he had not told her, but she had felt no alarm because they had been, she was sure, things that did not matter. And then he had, so often, come and told her, told her with his charming smile and those open eyes of his, so that there could be no question of his keeping anything back. She had studied the relationship of mother and son so perfectly that she had had precisely the right “touch” with him, never demanding what he was not ready to give, always receiving the confidences that he handed her. But now for the first time he was keeping things back, things that mattered. When she had spoken so bravely to Maradick a fortnight ago, on that day when she had first caught sight of the possible danger, she had thought that she was strong enough and wise enough to wait, patiently, with perfect trust. But it was not possible, it could not be done. She could not sit there, with her hands folded, whilst some strange woman down there in that dark, mysterious town caught her boy away from her. Every day her alarm had grown; she had noticed, too, that their relationship had changed. It had been so wonderful and beautiful, so delicate and tender, that any alteration in its colour was at once apparent to her. He had not been so frank, there had been even a little artificiality in his conversations with her. It was more than she could bear.