himself; outside that precinct, walled and guarded, stood his mother, alone, too proud to admit that she stood outside, too wilfully blind to see the unbroken wall that fronted her, and, in any case, too proud to clamour for admittance. But the friendship that immediately arose between Jim and Ivor Restormel was to Gundred as a sudden light of revelation, laying bare the fact of her exclusion from her son’s life. Characteristically, even to herself, she would not admit what she saw, but attributed the novel pain to her anxiety for Jim’s welfare. That Jim should have friends of his own age had been grudgingly conceded as an odious necessity, to be cavilled at and snubbed, but impossible to deny. Now, however, that the pernicious influence that had so mysteriously gripped her husband threatened to enthral her son as well, Gundred told herself that all her maternal duties, no less than her conjugal, commanded her to take the field against the powers of darkness. Her jealousy masqueraded as pure motherly zeal, and its very bitterness was masked from her own sight by the disguise of duty. Her feeling, too, was intensified by the failure of all her usual weapons to discredit Ivor Restormel in the eyes of his new friend. Jim generally sat and answered her in submissive affirmatives, while she gently dissected his friends and pointed out how entirely unworthy they all were of approval, though not, of course, of pity; now, however, he could not even give her criticism the courtesy of apparent acquiescence.