He helped her into the trap (it no longer surprised her to find they were alone) and said: "I'm afraid it's not very comfortable. That cushion's for your back. We'll have some tea at the Arms before we start." She managed to answer: "Yes, dear. I think I would like some tea." To herself she said: "I wonder which of them thought about giving me tea, about bringing this cushion." Ronnie clambered up; took the reins; and tipped the porters. In silence, they drove to the inn. There the hot tea and the hot buttered toast, which he coaxed her to eat, brought back a little of Julia's courage; but the waitress, popping--eager-faced at sight of strangers--in and out of the coffee-room, made free speech impossible. Perforce they confined conversation to generalities. He, she said, "looked extraordinarily well." She, he said, "looked the least bit tired." The lunch on the train, she told him, had been "execrable." The drive to the Cove, he told her, was a "good eight miles" and they would have to "take things easy" because of the luggage. Ought they, he asked, to have ordered her a car? Oh, no--she smiled, she preferred the trap: it would give them more time to talk. "I rather expected you'd bring Smithers," mentioned Ronnie. "I didn't think a maid--advisable," declared Julia. He paid for her tea, and they set off again--each silently uncertain of the other, each silently and socially constrained. But at last, as they drew clear of the town, Julia conquered constraint. "And how is Aliette?" she asked quietly. All the way down in the train she had intended to speak both to and of "that woman" as "Mrs. Brunton"; but since seeing Ronnie she knew that she could never even think in terms of "Mrs. Brunton" or of "that woman" again. Sinner in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the mother whose boy she had made so happy, Hector Brunton's guilty wife was already a saint. "Quite well." His quietness matched her own. "I'm glad." And suddenly, impetuously, he burst out: "Mater, she's so wonderful." Now mother and son were alone in a world of sky and heather; and the brown pony, as though aware of impending confidences, slowed to a walk. She put a tremulous hand on his driving arm. "Tell me--the whole story," said Julia. His fingers loosed the reins; and that afternoon, as the brown pony ambled toward the sea, he told her the full tale of his love for Aliette, of his love for both of them: till, listening, it seemed to Julia Cavendish as though never before had she understood the heart of her son. And that afternoon, for the first time in all her sixty years, she--whose lifelong struggle had been to cramp life in the bonds of formal religion--saw that formal religion at its very highest could only be a code for slaves, for the weak and the ignorant. For the soul of a free individual, for the strong and the wise of the earth, no formalities--whether of religion, of law, or of social observances--could exist.