He made a fierce gesture of denial at the first part of her sentence, and added at the last, with a sort of mocking echo, ‘Out of your own care!’ ‘I have said that it is time we understood each other,’ she said, ‘I don’t know whether it was merely to wound me that you flung at me that suggestion that I was not your mother.’ Here she made a pause, and he too, his attention suspended with an excitement that took away his breath. ‘If that was the motive, it was fully successful. It did wound me. But if you had any real doubt on the subject----’ ‘He had, he had!’ he said to himself, the blood throbbing in his head with a giddy sense of mounting up and up to the circles of the brain, and yet he knew very well what she was going to say, and knew also that it was true. ‘It seems strange that I should have to put such an assurance into words. Who would have borne with your alienation and your caprices, but your mother? Many women even, in the circumstances, would have said, Let him go. If nature has no voice, if there are no recollections of your childhood to move you--never mind! Say it since you feel it. But I have not been willing to do that. I have felt that the moment would come--and the moment has come--when, you would have nobody but me. I have spoken to Susie about it,’ she added, with a slight tremor in her voice. ‘Susie!’ The name brought a new sensation--something that touched his heart. ‘Your sister--your only sister--as I am your only mother, though you have so strangely misconceived me and denied me. I put that all down to the circumstances, not to you. I am not blaming you--only we must understand each other now.’ John, leaning on the mantelpiece with his face overshadowed by his hand, knew in his heart that all this was true. He made no attempt within himself to deny it. The reality of it was too much for him. It went into his heart like a stone in deep water, deep, deep to the bottom, where it lay a dead weight never to be got rid of. He could not protest or say anything, as if he were surprised by this sudden announcement. He was not surprised. He felt now that he had known it all well enough, that when he said otherwise it had only been in the impulse of the moment, with a frantic short-lived hope that perhaps that might come true. Alas! he knew very well that it was this which was true. He seemed to remember her now always silent, cold, an image of reserve and gravity in the midst of the more cheerful scenes in his memory. It was rather from the extreme occupation of his mind with these thoughts and recollections which surged through it, than from any antagonistic intention that he said nothing. But standing there with his head bent and his eyes lowered it was not wonderful that he should appear to her an impersonation of silent rebellion, a determined opponent.