Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As much as ever Roger was an orphan.