It gave Michael a consciousness of a new and most affectionate intimacy to find his mother alone in the house in Cheyne Walk. It was scarcely yet September, and the desolation of London all around seemed the more sharply to intagliate upon his senses the fineness of his mother’s figure set in the frame of that sedate house. They had tea together in her own room, and it struck him with a sudden surprise to see her once again in black. The room with its rose du Barri and clouded pastels sustained her beauty and to her somber attire lent a deeper poignancy; or perhaps it was something apart from the influence of the room, this so incontestable pathos, and was rather the effect of the imprisonment of her elusiveness by a chain whose power Michael had not suspected. Always, for nearly as many years as he could remember, when he had kissed her she had seemed to evade the statement of any positive and ordinary affection. Her personality had fluttered for a moment to his embrace and fled more than swiftly. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, the years were swept away, and he was sitting up for an extra half hour at the seaside, while she with her face flushed by another August sunset was leaning over him. The river became the sea, and the noise of the people on the Embankment were the people walking on the promenade below. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, her embrace gave to him what it had not given during all the years between—a consciousness that he depended upon her life. “Dearest boy,” she murmured, “how good of you to come back so quickly from the Carthews!” “But I would much rather be with you,” said Michael. Indeed, as he sat beside her holding her hand, he wondered to himself how he had been able to afford to miss so many opportunities of sitting like this, and immediately afterward wondered at himself for being able to sit like this without any secret dread that he was making himself absurd by too much demonstrativeness. After all, it was very easy to show emotion even to one’s mother without being ridiculous. “Poor Dicky Prescott,” she said, and tears quickly blurred her great gray eyes and hung quivering on the shadowy lashes beneath. Michael held her hand closer when he saw she was beginning to cry. He felt no awe of her grief, as he had when she told him of his father’s death. This simpler sorrow brought her so much nearer to him. She was speaking of Prescott’s death as she might have spoken of the loss of a cherished possession, a dog perhaps or some familiar piece of jewelry. “I shall never get used to not having him to advise me. Besides, he was the only person to whom I could talk about Charles—about your father. Dicky was so bound up with all my life. So long as he was alive, I had some of the past with me.” Michael nodded with comprehending gravity of assent.