`Might he never have had it if I'd kept him at home, not let him go to Nottingham?' was one of the first things she asked.

`He might not have been so bad,' said the doctor.

Mrs Morel stood condemned on her own ground.

`I should have watched the living, not the dead,' she told herself.

Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could not afford a nurse. He grew worse, and the crisis approached. One night he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly feeling of dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense irritability to be breaking down, and consciousness makes a last flare of struggle, like madness.

`I s'll die, mother!' he cried, heaving for breath on the pillow.

She lifted him up, crying in a small voice:

`Oh, my son--my son!'

That brought him to. He realized her. His whole will rose up and arrested him. He put his head on her breast, and took ease of her for love.

`For some things,' said his aunt, `it was a good thing Paul was ill that Christmas. I believe it saved his mother.'

Paul was in bed for seven weeks. He got up white and fragile. His father had bought him a pot of scarlet and gold tulips. They used to flame in the window in the March sunshine as he sat on the sofa chattering to his mother. The two knitted together in perfect intimacy. Mrs Morel's life now rooted itself in Paul.

William had been a prophet. Mrs Morel had a little present and a letter from Lily at Christmas. Mrs Morel's sister had a letter at the New Year.

`I was at a ball last night. Some delightful people were there, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly,' said the letter. `I had every dance--did not sit out one.'

Mrs Morel never heard any more of her.

Morel and his wife were gentle with each other for some time after the death of their son. He would go into a kind of daze, staring wide-eyed and blank across the room. Then he got up suddenly and hurried out to the Three Spots, returning in his normal state. But never in his life would he go for a walk up Shepstone, past the office where his son had worked, and he always avoided the cemetery.