A year later John Fellows was married. In spite of Abner’s scorn the proceeding was natural enough. The man was under forty, and had been a widower for more than fourteen years. The new wife, the woman of the tunnel, was a girl named Alice Higgins, the elder daughter of an old friend of Fellows, the timekeeper at the colliery, who had lost his left leg many years ago in a crushing fall of coal. She was tall, slight, with a fair complexion and honey-coloured hair: in every physical particular the opposite of her swart and stubby husband. If such a thing had to be, Abner would have preferred the maturer charms of Mrs Moseley, whom he knew so well and liked, to those of any stranger. Indeed, from the day of his father’s marriage onward his life became more complicated. The very presence in the house of this new inmate, a woman wielding authority, whom he remembered only a little time ago as a girl with a pigtail down her back, made him awkward. His father had never even mentioned their meeting in the lane—probably he had not recognised Abner, but the boy was certain that Alice had seen him and remembered. The consciousness of this mystery that they shared only aggravated the distrust and shyness that separated them: a shyness which Alice herself honestly tried to overcome by little overtures of affection. She was quite determined, in her quiet way, that she wasn’t going to be like the stepmothers of tradition. She would try to be a real mother to Abner. But how did real mothers feel? ‘Why don’t you call me mother, like other boys would, Abner?’ she said one day, coaxingly. Abner only laughed. She hated him for laughing at her. A boy of his age! But the real trouble did not begin till a year later when the first baby of the new family was coming. It was a bad time for all of them. John Fellows, after fifteen years of a widower’s life, had forgotten anything that he had ever learnt in the way of matrimonial tactics. He wasn’t any longer a young man, and his nature had inevitably stiffened. Besides, the coming of this child was not like the adventure of Abner’s birth, when he and his first wife had been two tender young people rather overwhelmed by the responsibilities of marriage. Alice became more conscious than ever of the gap of years that separated them, the distance which had always been implicit in her idea of her father’s friend, ‘Mr Fellows.’ With her it could never be naturally ‘John.’ And now that she wanted somebody to take hold of her and share her fears she found herself face to face with an elderly stranger. She was frightened at the thought of being so utterly alone. Abner, a member of her own generation, and the son of her baby’s father, was a symbol of the whole disastrous circumstance.