None of the other Beatups ever went to see Tom at Eastbourne. The journey was too expensive, and they were sure to have him home on leave before long. Mrs. Beatup went about twice a week, with various messages from the rest of the family muddled up in her head. She would sit beside him, holding his hand, strangely delicate with sickness, between her own hard, cracked, work-weary ones, wishing that they could find more to say to each other, and at the same time cherishing those numbered moments when she could have him to herself. Thyrza went oftener, shutting up shop with a recklessness that would have ruined a less personal business. Tom’s only other visitor was the Reverend Mr. Sumption. He came one afternoon to inquire about Jerry, but Tom could not tell him much. Jerry kept away from him, and the little that Beatup knew of his doings he was anxious to conceal from his father. “Maybe now he’s out there he’ll get on better,” he suggested. “Better? He’s always done well,” said Mr. Sumption loftily. “He’ll have to do unaccountable well if he does better. Don’t think, Tom, that I came to you because I doubted my son, but he was never much of a letter-writer, and now, being busy and all....” That night Tom lay awake an hour or so, thinking of parents. It was queer how they stuck to their children. His mother, now, coming all this way to see him, though she was nervous of the journey and had very little money to spend on it.... Mr. Sumption, too, standing up for that lousy tyke of a Jerry.... Would he ever feel like this for one of his own flesh—not only when that one lay helpless and dependent on him, but had gone out from him and chosen his own path? “Even as a father pitieth his children ...” so the Bible said, and seemingly there was no bound or end to that pity. Perhaps one day he would feel it in his own heart (the curve of Thyrza’s arms made him think of a cradle). He remembered what Mr. Sumption had said to him long ago, the night before he joined up—“You’ll understand a bit of what I feel ... some day when you’re the father of a son.” 7 Perhaps it was the inactivity of the days that made Tom lie awake so much at night. He generally had an hour or two to wait for sleep, and it seemed as if in those hours his thoughts jumped and raced in a way they never did by daylight. It was in those hours that he formed his resolution to marry Thyrza before he went back to France. When he left hospital he would probably have a fortnight or so at home, and they could be married at once by licence. Then, he felt, with a sudden swallowing in his throat, he would have had his little bit of life, even if Fritz cut it short before he could see those arms he loved become the cradle he had dreamed them.