A lamp burned near at hand. Mrs. Thesiger opened her letters and read them. She threw them on to the table when she had read them through. But there was one which angered her, and replacing it in its envelope, she tossed it so petulantly aside that it slid off the iron table and fell at Sylvia's feet. Sylvia stooped and picked it up. It had fallen face upward. "This is from my father." Mrs. Thesiger looked up startled. It was the first time that Sylvia had ever spoken of him to her. A wariness come into her eyes. "Well?" she asked. "I want to go to him." Sylvia spoke very simply and gently, looking straight into her mother's face with that perplexing steadiness of gaze which told so very little of what thoughts were busy behind it. Her mother turned her face aside. She was rather frightened. For a while she made no reply at all, but her face beneath its paint looked haggard and old in the white light, and she raised her hand to her heart. When she did speak, her voice shook. "You have never seen your father. He has never seen you. He and I parted before you were born." "But he writes to you." "Yes, he writes to me," and for all that she tried, she could not altogether keep a tone of contempt out of her voice. She added with some cruelty: "But he never mentions you. He has never once inquired after you, never once." Sylvia looked very wistfully at the letter, but her purpose was not shaken. "Mother, I want to go to him," she persisted. Her lips trembled a little, and with a choke of the voice, a sob half caught back, she added: "I am most unhappy here." The rarity of a complaint from Sylvia moved her mother strangely. There was a forlornness, moreover, in her appealing attitude. Just for a moment Mrs. Thesiger began to think of early days of which the memory was at once a pain and a reproach. A certain little village underneath the great White Horse on the Dorsetshire Downs rose with a disturbing vividness before her eyes. She almost heard the mill stream babble by. In that village of Sutton Poyntz she had herself been born, and to it she had returned, caught back again for a little while by her own country and her youth, that Sylvia might be born there too. These months had made a kind of green oasis in her life. She had rested there in a farm-house, after a time of much turbulence, with the music of running water night and day in her ears, a high-walled garden of flowers and grass about her, and the downs with the shadow-filled hollows, and brown treeless slopes rising up from her very feet. She could not but think of that short time of peace, and her voice softened as she answered her daughter. "We don't keep step, Sylvia," she said, with an uneasy laugh. "I know that. But, after all, would you be happier with your father, even if he wants to keep you! You have all you want here--frocks, amusement, companions. Try to be more friendly with people." But Sylvia merely shook her head.