Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here, Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see it's Roger!" Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure, she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice, "Hello, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not