“Isn’t mother rather thin?” he asked his father. Mr. Ingleby smiled, and in his grave, shy way put out his hand to touch hers as it lay on the table. “You silly boy,” said his mother. But her denials did not satisfy him. He knew, for certain, that she was different from the mother whom he had known. He noticed, too, that she was not allowed to eat the same food as the rest of them. Sometimes she would forget their rules and taste things that were forbidden, and then his father would gravely reprove her. Instead of bread she was ordered to eat a sort of biscuit which Edwin’s curiosity made him anxious to taste. He was disappointed; for they had no taste at all. “What are they made of?” he asked; and they told him “Gluten. . . . That’s the sticky part of wheat without starch.” And yet, in spite of her illness, they had never been happier together. The new intimacy, that had begun with her painful confidences of the first evening, continued. In particular she told him of the difficulties which she was having with his Aunt Laura, her sister, who had lately married a small manufacturer and come to live near Halesby. The story was an old one and rather unhappy. It began years and years ago in the days of his mother’s childhood, days that she remembered so unhappily that she never really wanted to recall them. He had never before known anything about his mother’s childhood. He had just taken her for granted in her present surroundings. Now, in the long firelight evenings, she told him how her forefathers and his had once been great people, living in a stone border castle high above the Monmouth marches, and how, with the lapse of time and the decay of the bloody age in which their violence had prospered, the family had fallen from its estate and lost its lands; how the tower of the castle had been broken and under its shadow a farmhouse had arisen in which they had lived and scraped what income they could make from a little valley-land and many acres of mountain pasture. Now there were none of them left there; but still, where the tracks grew stony and the orchards began to thin away, the walls of the house crumbled patiently under the shadow of overhanging mountain-ridges. “Your grandfather was the last of them, Eddie,” she said. “He was a farmer.” And for a moment consciousness of Griffin and his social prejudices invaded the picture. She told him of spring days, when the clouds would come sweeping out of England on the back of the east wind and be hurried like the frothy comb of a wave against the mountains, and how they would then break asunder on the darens and fall back in a drenching mist over the lonely house by Felindre, and for days the farm would be islanded in fog. But on the summit above them, the sheep were grazing in the sunlight and the buzzards hunting, and in the misty lowlands beneath lay orchards full of faint-scented apple blossom. “We were not the only decayed family there,” she said. “There were others,