"I was just a kid then," said he. "I suppose I was always asking questions."

"Don't you now?"

"No, not so much, why should I? Mater, you don't expect me always to be a silly little fool, do you?"

The breath was deep she drew.

"You were far from being a silly little fool then, John. Those questions were all wonderful to me, even the last one."

He laid both his hands upon her shoulders and looked far into her eyes.

"You take life so seriously, Mater," he said.

"Only when it loses its seriousness, John," she replied. "I was full of the joy of it in those days when always you were flinging your earnest little questions at me. It's now when it seems to me sometimes you want to play with life that I take it seriously. It's now, when sometimes you give me the impression you just want to enjoy life, that all the joy goes out of it. I wonder would you understand, my dearest," she slipped her arm about his neck, "if I told you you were more of a man to me then than often you are now."

"Well, dash it, Mater, I can't help it. We don't go mooching about the 'Varsity with long faces wondering about G.o.d. Every chap enjoys himself as much as he can and that all depends on the allowance he gets from his people. They're jolly decent to me that way. I've a good deal more than most fellows. Why, I have a corking time up there and why shouldn't I? I shall be young only once."

"You might always be young," she whispered. "They're teaching you that youth's a thing to spend, like money when you have it. I know it's all the training, my dear. I ought never to have let you go. I'd never have taught you that."

"I shouldn't have got much joy out of working on this bally old farm, should I?" he retaliated. "The Pater's busy enough down at Wenlock Hall, but he doesn't actually do manual work. He's always going round the place. I don't suppose it pays, real profits, I mean, like old Peverell makes this pay, but it gives plenty of employment."

"Pater? Is that what you call him now?"

After the sound of that word, she had heard no more. It rang with countless echoes in her brain. What a sound it might have had if ever she had loved. Was it as hollow to other women as it was to her now?

"He asked me to, this year," said John. "Just before I went up to the 'Varsity. I couldn't refuse, could I? After all, he is my father.

Lots of people say I'm awfully like him."

Mary turned away.

"I must go out and fetch the cows now," she said. "Would you like to come?"

He showed an instant's pause. Before it had pa.s.sed, swiftly that instant her pride arrested it.

"Perhaps you were going to do something else," said she.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I was going to take old Peverell's gun round by the wood. It's alive with rabbits. He says they're spoiling his mangolds."

"All right, my dear. I'll see you at supper-time."

She drove the cows into the shed. One by one they filed into their accustomed stalls. Mechanically she fastened the chains about their necks and took down her stool and brought her pail. Leaning her cheek as so many times she had done against the first warm flank, she looked up. The setting sun was shining through the window.

V

This and many other such conversations revealed in time to Mary that which she had both known and feared. John was changing. Every fresh occasion of their meeting he was altered a little more. The possessive pa.s.sion, inherent in the very nature of his s.e.x, was stirring in him.

Gradually but inevitably they were wakening in him the pride of inheritance. Less and less did it seem to her he was creating his own.

It was all too subtle to arrest, too elusive to oppose. Still, as always, he had his charm. Both Peverell and his wife found him altered, it was true, but improved.

"There be gettin' the grand manner of the squire about 'en," Peverell said one day when he went back to Somerset before returning to Oxford.

"How many acres is it coming to 'en? Two thousand! Well! A young man needs his head set right way on to let none o' that go wastin'."

Not even did Mary let Mrs. Peverell see the wound she had. Scarcely herself did she realize how deep it had gone. But more than in his manner and the things he said, it was in his att.i.tude to Lucy she was made most conscious of his change.

During his first holidays, they had played together as though no difference had entered their lives to separate them. The next time they were more reserved. A shyness had come over them which partly Mary justified to herself, ascribing it to that awkwardness of the schoolboy who, if he is not playing some manly game or doing some manly thing, is ever ready to fear the accusation of ridiculousness.

But it was before he went to Oxford, while he was yet at school that the change in him became more than that merely of confusion. It was plain to be seen that he avoided her then. A solitary figure, wandering in the Highfield meadow where first they had met, where, most likely it was, they still would meet whenever he was at Yarningdale, showed to Mary the patient heart that watched and waited for him.

Sometimes at Mary's invitation she joined and walked with them. Often it was no more than a shouted greeting from John, flung into the wind over his shoulder, after which the little figure would disappear through the willow trees and for the rest of those holidays perhaps be seen no more, or ever be mentioned by John.

"Have you lost all interest in Lucy?" Mary asked him straightly once when, at the end of his time at Yarningdale, he was packing up his things for the rest of his holiday in Somerset.

He looked up, at first surprised and then with color rising in his cheeks.

"What do you mean by interest?" he asked. "I like her very much. If you mean I haven't seen her these holidays, I can't go hunting her out, can I?"

"Can't you? You used to once."

"Well, I was a kid then. So was she. She's nearly seventeen now."

"Doesn't it all come back to a matter of interest though? You can't be interested, of course, if you're not. I'm not suggesting that you're being willfully unkind to her. I don't think you'd be willfully unkind to any one; but do you know what will happen as soon as you've gone?"

"What?"

"She'll come round here on some pretext. She'll contrive to seek me out and gradually we shall begin to talk about you and then, most cunningly it will seem to herself she is doing it, she'll ask whether you said anything about her while you were here and if you did what it was and how you said it or what I think you meant by it."

John flung the things into his bag.

"I wish you wouldn't encourage her, Mater," he exclaimed.

She came across the room to him. She took his hands that clumsily were folding some garment before he could pack it. She forced him to turn his face to hers.

"It's just as much that she encourages me," she said. "Do you know I was jealous of her once?"

He guffawed with laughter and took her face in his hands and kissed her between the eyes.

"I was," she whispered, her voice made more than tender with that kiss.

"When she first took your thoughts a moment from me, that day you met her when we were making hay in the Highfield meadow, I was jealous then.

Now we have one thing, so closely in common that, though she's only sixteen and I'm forty-seven we've become inseparable friends."

"What do you mean, one thing in common?"

"The old John."