Very resolutely he had dismissed from his mind all thought of his mother. Even in Dartmoor he had excluded her from his thoughts. If he remembered at all, it was by the letter that had come to him on the day of his conviction. His father had died that week; he had been sinking for months and had never been conscious of his son’s shame. That had been Peter’s one comfort, until he received his mother’s letter, telling him that in a lucid hour of consciousness old Donald Dawlish had struck his name from his will. So Peter went down from the dock with the bitterness of death in his heart; beside that knowledge of his father’s last act, the seven years’ sentence was as nothing. At six o’clock Elizabeth brought him his tea. She was unusually solemn and silent, and when he attempted to start a little conversation with her, she was so embarrassed that he did not attempt to pursue this course. He went out for an hour, strolling through the Lambeth Cut amid a medley of hawkers’ stalls with their glaring acetylene lights. He had some comfort from this contact with his fellows. As he returned, he was opening the door of the house with a key which the woman had given him that day, when he remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Inglethorne since the visitation of the police. He went upstairs, lit the oil lamp and, putting a paper bag full of biscuits which he had bought on the table before him, he settled down to his task. Eight o’clock was striking when he heard the squeaking of brakes as a motor car stopped before the door, and, going to the window, he pulled aside the shade and looked down. It was too dark to distinguish the visitor, but his heart leaped at the thought that it might be Leslie Maughan and he opened the door and waited. This time he heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s voice and after a while she called up to him sourly: “A lady to see you, Mr. Dawlish.” “Will you ask her to come up, please?” He went back into the room and waited. The step on the stairs was slower and heavier than Leslie’s. And then there came through the open doorway the last woman in the world he expected to see--his mother. Her cold eyes went from him to the littered table. “Fine work for the son of a gentleman!” she said in a hard voice. “I’ve known worse,” he replied coolly. She closed the door behind her, as though she knew something of Mrs. Inglethorne’s irrepressible curiosity. “I never expected I should see you again,” she said, declining with a gesture the chair he pushed forward to her; “but having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that I ought to do something for you. I am buying and stocking a small farm for you in western Canada, and I am making you a small allowance to enable you to live, even if the farm fails, as it probably will. You will leave for Quebec on Saturday week; I have booked a second-class passage for you.” And, when he was about to speak: