Page:Dark Hester.djvu/243

pause. ‘Clive saw how upset he was, when he came back last night, from you, and found him sitting alone in the garden. That’s another reason, you see.—For hatred, I mean.—A good reason, don’t you think? Mothers oughtn’t to have pasts that let their children in for such experiences, ought they?—their nervous children.’ And now Hester glanced down at her with a smile of cutting self-mockery. ‘So I ran up the hill,’ she went on, after the comment, which Monica received with a deepening absorption, ‘and I could still see you, on the station road, walking very fast and, as he’d said, stopping now and then. It didn’t need a nervous little boy to see that something was wrong. So I told him to stay in the nursery and that I’d find you and cheer you up, and I ran down by the lane and through the woods and I’ve been dogging you ever since. When I saw you walking over the common and picking gorse, I thought that perhaps you didn’t mean anything. But when you came back into the copse and crept under the wires and looked up and down the line— and at your watch—I knew; of course. So I followed you, keeping well out of sight, till you stopped above the gate—I saw how you were thinking it all out—and you didn’t hear me when I got up close behind you; the train