"I've frightened you--that's enough. You're not much more like your father than I am, but when you've done wrong you've got to stand on the wrong and climb up." "I'm trying to," he said. "If I talk like this to you it's because it's you, and there's only you that wants to hear. Only you and one other I'd tell it to." Another listener might have heard her take a breath. "Who's that?" she asked. He faced her, troubled but unflinching. "You've seen her," he said, and his utterance of the words was like a song in praise of her. "Yes," she said quietly, and covered her hands with her work. He lay deeper in his chair, and watched the fire. His hands were thrust into his pockets, and his chin was dropped; his face had the lost look of one who has forgotten his bodily existence. He had forgotten Janet, but she, looking on him with a kind of hatred, loved every curve and line of him with a pure jealousy of passion. This was the son she had never had, yet felt she must have borne. She looked back, and believed she had held him naked to her breast. Yet it was with a sharp cruelty that she spoke. "Well, can you not get her?" "No," he said, "not unless I stole her." "You'd never be called thief. Could you not do it?" she tempted him, taking pleasure in her own pain. "She's not a piece of goods," he said, and fell into a silence; but the muscles of his cheek were twitching, and at the sight of that her heart ached with a sickness of pity for him. She was all compassionate mother now, and she would have rent the world to get Theresa for him. She broke the stillness with a laugh he did not like to hear. "There's me," she said. "I'd get her for you." And her voice was venturesome, half afraid, ashamed of its own shame. She saw the quick red leap to his eyes. "Leave her alone!" he cried in anger. All the influences of his youth were strong on him. "But you'd never move her," he said, and his faith and his scorn stung her to a pang she hid from him. "Eh, would I not?" she answered coolly. "This'll be why you've not been here, then?" "I think it's why I nearly killed my father. It's easy blaming myself for nearly doing murder, but I see now that all these days I've been feeling murder towards that man she's going to marry. D'you know I've not seen the sky for weeks? I've been walking through a visible blackness. It's the truth I'm telling," he said simply. "And then to-day I came home, and found him drunk or mad, raving against my mother because she'd had a letter from old Webb, and one she'd read to him, as innocent and clean as Webb himself. And she stands there, smiling at him, stroking his hand, talking to him, as if he had a fever. If she'd had half a dozen children it would have been better for them both. Janet, it's pure self-indulgence in her, or was, and now it's just a habit. She's mothered him, and mothered him, because she has an endless power of giving, and he's gulped it all down, and will go on doing it till the end."