She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the shore by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!" "What boy did that?" "I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street." "Mother, mother. Tell me about that." She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself, "Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!" But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking, "Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears, slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped softly into dreamless sleep.