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he trusted her, completely; with his own and with Hester’s life. ‘I was horribly upset,’ he said.

‘Yes. Of course. But you trusted her.’

‘It wasn’t my trust I was thinking of,’ Clive muttered. ‘It was something very different.—All the way up here, after I’d left you—it was something very different I was thinking of.—It was of him.’ A scarlet flush mounted to his face as he spoke. ‘I understand what’s happened, Mother; and you understand. Hester understands too; though she won’t accept it. How could you have believed anything but what you did—of a man like that?’

As she heard his broken phrases; as she saw the dark, bright colour rise to her son’s face, Monica, for a moment, knew such a turning of the heart that she feared her own blood would echo his. But it was, she felt, a drained pallor that met Clive’s eyes as he opened them to look, heavily, at her, and as she heard her own voice saying: ‘A man like that?’

‘Why, Mummy, don’t let’s pretend,’ said Clive. He felt her emotion, though it was so stilled, and he moved his eyes from her face and looked out of the window beyond her head. ‘You may have liked him; but that was because you knew nothing, really, about him. I know, unfortunately, a great deal. I