qing-yao/datives-no_datives · Datasets at Hugging Face

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“Would they pay anyone who sprained his ankle a fiver ? ” he asked, sticking to the main point.
“You pay a year’s subscription and that entitles accident insurance you . ”
This was in the days before every daily paper in London was competing madly against its rivals in the matter of insurance and offering the citizens princely bribes to make a fortune by breaking their necks.
“Good heavens, ass, ” snorted Ukridge, “you don’t suppose I’m suggesting that we should leave chance it , do you?
“In my old rooms. ” I could not see that this lent the place any fascination .
I was gloating happily over the picture conjured up by Ukridge’s words when an exclamation brought the realities of life me back with a start .
It was not so much the fact that he was drinking deeply of Barolini’s eight-shilling champagne while we, from lack of funds, were compelled to confine meaner beverages ourselves ; what really marred the pleasantness of the function was the extraordinary effect the stuff had on Teddy.
And even Ukridge, though his haughty soul was seared to its foundations by the latter’s personal remarks, promised to take heart his homily and act upon it at the earliest possible moment.
Ukridge sank a hoarse whisper his voice .
Teddy Weeks, his head thrown back in that gallant way which has endeared so many female hearts him , was exhibiting his celebrated teeth.
I had been away, paying uncongenial relatives in the country a duty visit , and it had rained and rained and rained.
“And now, old horse, you may lead the coal hole me across the street for a short snifter.
“And looking after him includes tucking him up on my sofa and singing sleep him ? ”
“I just took him along and showed the management him .
Take him for all in all, I had never met a man so calculated to convert pacifism the most truculent swashbuckler at a glance; and when I recalled Ukridge’s story of the little unpleasantness at Marseilles and realised that a mere handful of half a dozen able-bodied seamen had had the temerity to engage this fellow in personal conflict, it gave me a thrill of patriotic pride.
He did him everything that a man can do who is hampered with boxing-gloves, until presently the troubled one was leaning heavily against the ropes, his head hanging dazedly, his whole attitude that of a man who would just as soon let the matter drop.
I might try to get him the job . ”
Tod Bingham is going round the East-end halls offering anyone who ’ll stay four rounds with him two hundred quid .
George was the best fellow in the world, but the atmosphere of the Foreign Office had increased a sort of precise fussiness the tendency he had always had from boyhood , and it upset him if his affairs did not run exactly on schedule.
One of those damned sentimental blurbs they print about pugilists nowadays, saying what a good chap he was in private life and how he always sent his old mother a telegram after each fight and gave her half the purse.
She agreed the moment I put her the thing , and sat down and wrote that letter without a blink.
The light gleamed on his pince-nez and lent his set face a gruesome pallor .
If you had come a moment earlier, I’d have introduced dora you . ” The bus was lumbering out of sight into Piccadilly Circus, and the white figure on top turned and gave a final wave.
She used to send bed me with the beastly things and ask me questions about them at breakfast.
I wish I could have done her more . ”
This did not interest any marked extent the great bulk of the intelligentsia , the animal having started at a hundred to three, but it meant much to me, for I had drawn his name in the sweepstake at my club.
This did not interest the great bulk of the intelligentsia to any marked extent, the animal having started at a hundred to three, but it meant me much , for I had drawn his name in the sweepstake at my club.
It is nice to think that the affair brought someone pleasure .
He lent me it . ”
I had been passing in my mind a number of good snappy things to say to him, but his appearance touched such an extent that i held them in me .
One of the most admirable qualities a bloke can possess, and nobody has a greater extent than you it .
“What I’m trying to say is that I knew you would be delighted to tackle me this little job .
The hawk moved over to the window, leaving ourselves us .
“You will remember mr. jevons me you see him, won’t you? ” said Ukridge’s aunt.
“And, Mr. Corcoran. ” She was still smiling amiably, but there had come into her voice a note like that which it had had on a certain memorable occasion when summoning his doom Ukridge from the unseen interior of his Sheep’s Cray Cottage.
I think that, if he had confined mere looks-however offensive-i himself would have gone no farther into the matter.
Those harsh words stung the quick me .
The sentiment was so admirable that I could not take its phraseology exception .
Then, having shaken his hand, I thanked his courteous assistance him once more and borrowed my fare back to Civilisation on the Underground, and we parted with mutual expressions of good will.
“It’s not often I ask you to do me anything . . .
“It’s not often I ask you to do me anything , laddie, but I beg and implore you to rally round now and show yourself the true friend I know you are.
It was the largest, gayest, most exuberantly ornate specimen of head-wear that I had ever seen, and the prospect of spending four hours and a quarter in its society added my already poignant gloom the last touch .
“I brought Cecil along, ” said Flossie’s (and presumably Cecil’s) mother, after the stripling, having growled a cautious greeting, obviously with the mental reservation that it committed nothing him , had returned to the window, “because I thought it would be nice for ’im to say he had seen London. ”
At six-forty-six, ignoring the pink hat which protruded from the window of a third-class compartment and the stout hand that waved a rollicking farewell, I turned from the train with a pale, set face, and, passing down the platform of Euston Station, told a cabman to take ukridge ’s lodgings in arundel street , leicester square me with all speed .
Cecil’s society and conversation had done much to neutralise the effects of a gentle upbringing, and I toyed almost luxuriously with the thought of supplying his next visit to the metropolis him with an Arundel Street Horror .
It seems she has a habit of popping up to London at intervals, and Flossie, while she loves and respects her, finds that from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour of the old dear gives her such an extent that she ’s a nervous wreck for days the pip . ”
His muscles seemed more cable-like than ever, and a recent hair-cut had given his head a knobby, bristly appearance which put him even more definitely than before in the class of those with whom the sensible man would not lightly quarrel.
Round three added the battler ’s score further points , and at the end of round four Alf Todd had lost so much ground that the most liberal odds were required to induce speculators to venture their cash on his chances.
For an instant sheer surprise seemed to shackle Mr. Todd’s limbs, then he adjusted the new conditions himself .
He had fired my imagination with tales of authors who were able to turn out five thousand words a day by dictating a stenographer their stuff instead of writing it; and though I felt at the time that he was merely trying to drum up trade for the typewriting bureau in which his young friend Dora Mason was now a partner, the lure of the idea had gripped me.
Dictating will add your income thousands a year .
“Don’t mention me that man’s name , old horse, ” he begged.
He took lunch me , and when he tipped the waiter the man burst into tears and kissed him on both cheeks. ”
“I thought, if you would lend a hand, old man, we could get the carlton him .
She could not help rubbing it in as she drove the station Coral .
‘Oh, Sunflower, I’ve you such a nice cellar !
Yet, affected as she must always be by his each unconscious change of tone, how could she fail to respond when he laughed at this good joke of hers and, without admitting that he should or should not have written to Coral, put her it , as a woman and a collector, that it was time to change the subject.
She took the discovery up to town with her that Saturday, setting the monody of the train it .
Give grannie my love .
She put her aching head her hand .
In spite of herself she listened, marked it time , fled from it into the inmost recesses of her mind, and still listened to it as a sick woman listens to a fly roaming the room, or to a barrel-organ, devil-driven, in the street below.
She could have told all her unworldly air you, , that Rhoda (Laura did not approve of Rhoda) would wear entirely unsuitable clothes, yet look so garishly attractive in them that James would be once more unsettled in his mind: and that Wilfred, the good comrade, and always the more puritan in his tastes, would be relievedly ready to console Lucy: and that Lucy of the dove-grey frocks, and neat shoes and gloves, would be demurely ready to be consoled: and that in the small hours of Sunday she, Laura, would be roused from sound sleep to entertain pyjamas and receive confidences, bestowed, as a dog bestows the stone he wishes you to throw for him, with circlings and shyings, and coy withdrawals, with a depositing of it at your feet, and a thinking better of it, and a hasty retreat, and an elaborate pretence of wishing to be unmolested, and of not knowing anything of any stone at all.
Justin did not miss her till he had put the trouble of setting up the bridge table , a collapsible affair that he had never noticed was easier to manage with laura at his elbow to keep down the legs that were down and to hold up the legs that were up himself .
But she had chosen to stultify herself. . . . She had sacrificed what self-respect, common sense, common honesty sometimes, ? . . .
Not even to Justin, only to the mean, selfish fear of losing him. . . . Not love but fear had guided her in all her dealings. . . . She had wanted him for her own, her very own: she had encouraged every tendency, every fault, that would bind her him . . . . How unfair, how cruelly unfair, she had been to Justin! . . .
The foxgloves and the sorrel swayed and shook above her and she pulled their freshness ’ sake them down to her , and let them spring free again, and then lay back once more, her lips besmeared with dew and pollen, her hands clasped under her head, and watched the mists, not rising from the earth but thinning and vanishing where they lay, and the grey surface of the corn warming to bronze-tipped green, and the dawn-light spreading like a smile across the sky, and had no answering smile for it, but turned where she lay, stopping her ears against the riot of the birds, hiding her face from the sun, and at last falling, for very weariness, into a cramped, uneasy drowse.
She put her head her cold hand , and then dropped it again, stiffening where she lay.
I’ll get you it .
He had said only yesterday that he wanted more blackcap eggs. . . . She jerked her knees herself and listened.
Dear Laura was merely pleased with herself because, as Justin would have wished her to do, she had put childish things , such as telling herself stories when she went to bed , deciding the colour of her eldest grandson ’s eyes , and talking to justin when he was not there an end .
She drew the box towards her and stirred her hand round among the eggs; then, lifting a handful, poured the other them idly from one palm .
She pulled open the doors one by one, sliding out the glass, and ran hollow her hand from hollow in the cotton-wool.
Her feet had already carried the door her , but at that sound she slipped back into her chair, white, speechless, waiting.
But a thought, not of the unrealized present, but of that dreamlike far past, remained with her, stirring exertion her mind .
She turned on her pillow and abandoned terror-a terror beyond the decencies herself .
She, when she could, sat with him, eternally knitting the army that must always be to her but a multiplication of justin socks , thinking of him and herself, and now, with new, bewildered thoughts, of Gran’papa.
Laura, undeniably in the wrong, had, by all unwritten rules, necessarily to pay aunt adela forfeit , to attend without protest to a criticism of her untidy room, to hang up skirts under Aunt Adela’s eye, to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust ornaments to the high-pitched ripple of Aunt Adela’s voice, and to respond cheerfully in the infrequent pauses.
Laura, undeniably in the wrong, had, by all unwritten rules, necessarily to pay forfeit to Aunt Adela, to attend without protest to a criticism of her untidy room, to hang up skirts under Aunt Adela’s eye, to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust the high-pitched ripple of aunt adela ’s voice ornaments , and to respond cheerfully in the infrequent pauses.
She may gae me to-France !
Well-and if he is killed and you are poor-you’ll be able to feed a child, and clothe it, and teach it to read, I suppose-if you can’t send eton it .
Laura handed the maid her basket , but she had not long to wait.
Cloud of the Lower Fifth, arriving for his half-term holiday and leaving chance no item of the program .
It smouldered, of course, flickering up occasionally into perplexed resentment: would never, I think-though Justin and Laura should miraculously adjust their differences-be completely extinguished; for it was not in Mrs. Cloud’s nature, so sweetly oblivious of sins against herself, ever to forgive a harshness or forget a kindness rendered to those she loved; but the hot ashes of it were hidden deep in her heart-she had found herself able, in time, to be reconciled, to pretend laura justice .
If only they had either of them seen fit to confide her the cause of their quarrel , she was sure that she could have helped them over it. . . . Justin was so much her own son that his reserve could not hurt her, but she thought Laura should have come to her. . . . She thought Laura owed her that. . . .
For, all the long week, she lived, fiercely as she denied herself it , in mad, fantastic expectation of that miracle.
Two days’ grace, or three, might be allowed her imaginary headache-but her on the fourth Brackenhurst clamoured for its indispensable Miss Valentine, and she must set out through by-ways to her Belgians and her babies, to lunch at the other end of the village, with an afternoon’s sewing to follow, and must keep her eyes bright and her tongue wagging to amuse her world the while.
For, after all her reckonings, it was Justin-Justin, taking like herself his tea-justin , whom she had not seen for nearly a year-justin his short cut through the woods , who was never going to speak to her again.
He was quite right: his mother would have kept him it hot till the crack of doom.
Laura thought she would leave him things : she knew by experience that if he did not want to talk nothing would make him: she did not think he was embarrassed, for he had always been too absorbed in himself to be self-conscious: therefore, if he talked, it would have some significance.
Yet she found that in his talk he was gradually and unwittingly explaining her himself .
On the third day he had gone to town to do his necessary shopping, and, in delighted extravagance, had brought back mrs. half Covent Garden
Timothy gave Laura a bad moment as she put bed him .
“Did you say uncle justin thank-you when you said good-night? ”
And he spoke-to the fire , to his own hands , rather than to the room, her-of certain things daily seen and heard and endured: spoke with a flatness of tone, a baldness of phrase, that, to her at least, underlined his facts as no eloquence could have done.
But she made the windy rain thudding at the windows no objection whatever: came downstairs to him with obliging readiness: sat listening with an air that might have been mistaken for satisfaction, .
Perhaps his mother would like to clean him them first?
Justin’s voice recalled her thoughts, shifted him them from herself .
He was explaining her himself , slowly, with naïve interest.
She raised his her eyes patiently, letting him see all he chose, before she dropped them again.
“I suppose--” His thoughts sent a standstill him with long strides up and down and up and down the room-brought him at last before Laura in her chair, thought-bound too, yet more at peace than he.

“Would they pay anyone who sprained his ankle a fiver ? ” he asked, sticking to the main point.

“You pay a year’s subscription and that entitles accident insurance you . ”

This was in the days before every daily paper in London was competing madly against its rivals in the matter of insurance and offering the citizens princely bribes to make a fortune by breaking their necks.

“Good heavens, ass, ” snorted Ukridge, “you don’t suppose I’m suggesting that we should leave chance it , do you?

“In my old rooms. ” I could not see that this lent the place any fascination .

I was gloating happily over the picture conjured up by Ukridge’s words when an exclamation brought the realities of life me back with a start .

It was not so much the fact that he was drinking deeply of Barolini’s eight-shilling champagne while we, from lack of funds, were compelled to confine meaner beverages ourselves ; what really marred the pleasantness of the function was the extraordinary effect the stuff had on Teddy.

And even Ukridge, though his haughty soul was seared to its foundations by the latter’s personal remarks, promised to take heart his homily and act upon it at the earliest possible moment.

Ukridge sank a hoarse whisper his voice .

Teddy Weeks, his head thrown back in that gallant way which has endeared so many female hearts him , was exhibiting his celebrated teeth.

I had been away, paying uncongenial relatives in the country a duty visit , and it had rained and rained and rained.

“And now, old horse, you may lead the coal hole me across the street for a short snifter.

“And looking after him includes tucking him up on my sofa and singing sleep him ? ”

“I just took him along and showed the management him .

Take him for all in all, I had never met a man so calculated to convert pacifism the most truculent swashbuckler at a glance; and when I recalled Ukridge’s story of the little unpleasantness at Marseilles and realised that a mere handful of half a dozen able-bodied seamen had had the temerity to engage this fellow in personal conflict, it gave me a thrill of patriotic pride.

He did him everything that a man can do who is hampered with boxing-gloves, until presently the troubled one was leaning heavily against the ropes, his head hanging dazedly, his whole attitude that of a man who would just as soon let the matter drop.

I might try to get him the job . ”

Tod Bingham is going round the East-end halls offering anyone who ’ll stay four rounds with him two hundred quid .

George was the best fellow in the world, but the atmosphere of the Foreign Office had increased a sort of precise fussiness the tendency he had always had from boyhood , and it upset him if his affairs did not run exactly on schedule.

One of those damned sentimental blurbs they print about pugilists nowadays, saying what a good chap he was in private life and how he always sent his old mother a telegram after each fight and gave her half the purse.

She agreed the moment I put her the thing , and sat down and wrote that letter without a blink.

The light gleamed on his pince-nez and lent his set face a gruesome pallor .

If you had come a moment earlier, I’d have introduced dora you . ” The bus was lumbering out of sight into Piccadilly Circus, and the white figure on top turned and gave a final wave.

She used to send bed me with the beastly things and ask me questions about them at breakfast.

I wish I could have done her more . ”

This did not interest any marked extent the great bulk of the intelligentsia , the animal having started at a hundred to three, but it meant much to me, for I had drawn his name in the sweepstake at my club.

This did not interest the great bulk of the intelligentsia to any marked extent, the animal having started at a hundred to three, but it meant me much , for I had drawn his name in the sweepstake at my club.

It is nice to think that the affair brought someone pleasure .

He lent me it . ”

I had been passing in my mind a number of good snappy things to say to him, but his appearance touched such an extent that i held them in me .

One of the most admirable qualities a bloke can possess, and nobody has a greater extent than you it .

“What I’m trying to say is that I knew you would be delighted to tackle me this little job .

The hawk moved over to the window, leaving ourselves us .

“You will remember mr. jevons me you see him, won’t you? ” said Ukridge’s aunt.

“And, Mr. Corcoran. ” She was still smiling amiably, but there had come into her voice a note like that which it had had on a certain memorable occasion when summoning his doom Ukridge from the unseen interior of his Sheep’s Cray Cottage.

I think that, if he had confined mere looks-however offensive-i himself would have gone no farther into the matter.

Those harsh words stung the quick me .

The sentiment was so admirable that I could not take its phraseology exception .

Then, having shaken his hand, I thanked his courteous assistance him once more and borrowed my fare back to Civilisation on the Underground, and we parted with mutual expressions of good will.

“It’s not often I ask you to do me anything . . .

“It’s not often I ask you to do me anything , laddie, but I beg and implore you to rally round now and show yourself the true friend I know you are.

It was the largest, gayest, most exuberantly ornate specimen of head-wear that I had ever seen, and the prospect of spending four hours and a quarter in its society added my already poignant gloom the last touch .

“I brought Cecil along, ” said Flossie’s (and presumably Cecil’s) mother, after the stripling, having growled a cautious greeting, obviously with the mental reservation that it committed nothing him , had returned to the window, “because I thought it would be nice for ’im to say he had seen London. ”

At six-forty-six, ignoring the pink hat which protruded from the window of a third-class compartment and the stout hand that waved a rollicking farewell, I turned from the train with a pale, set face, and, passing down the platform of Euston Station, told a cabman to take ukridge ’s lodgings in arundel street , leicester square me with all speed .

Cecil’s society and conversation had done much to neutralise the effects of a gentle upbringing, and I toyed almost luxuriously with the thought of supplying his next visit to the metropolis him with an Arundel Street Horror .

It seems she has a habit of popping up to London at intervals, and Flossie, while she loves and respects her, finds that from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour of the old dear gives her such an extent that she ’s a nervous wreck for days the pip . ”

His muscles seemed more cable-like than ever, and a recent hair-cut had given his head a knobby, bristly appearance which put him even more definitely than before in the class of those with whom the sensible man would not lightly quarrel.

Round three added the battler ’s score further points , and at the end of round four Alf Todd had lost so much ground that the most liberal odds were required to induce speculators to venture their cash on his chances.

For an instant sheer surprise seemed to shackle Mr. Todd’s limbs, then he adjusted the new conditions himself .

He had fired my imagination with tales of authors who were able to turn out five thousand words a day by dictating a stenographer their stuff instead of writing it; and though I felt at the time that he was merely trying to drum up trade for the typewriting bureau in which his young friend Dora Mason was now a partner, the lure of the idea had gripped me.

Dictating will add your income thousands a year .

“Don’t mention me that man’s name , old horse, ” he begged.

He took lunch me , and when he tipped the waiter the man burst into tears and kissed him on both cheeks. ”

“I thought, if you would lend a hand, old man, we could get the carlton him .

She could not help rubbing it in as she drove the station Coral .

‘Oh, Sunflower, I’ve you such a nice cellar !

Yet, affected as she must always be by his each unconscious change of tone, how could she fail to respond when he laughed at this good joke of hers and, without admitting that he should or should not have written to Coral, put her it , as a woman and a collector, that it was time to change the subject.

She took the discovery up to town with her that Saturday, setting the monody of the train it .

Give grannie my love .

She put her aching head her hand .

In spite of herself she listened, marked it time , fled from it into the inmost recesses of her mind, and still listened to it as a sick woman listens to a fly roaming the room, or to a barrel-organ, devil-driven, in the street below.

She could have told all her unworldly air you, , that Rhoda (Laura did not approve of Rhoda) would wear entirely unsuitable clothes, yet look so garishly attractive in them that James would be once more unsettled in his mind: and that Wilfred, the good comrade, and always the more puritan in his tastes, would be relievedly ready to console Lucy: and that Lucy of the dove-grey frocks, and neat shoes and gloves, would be demurely ready to be consoled: and that in the small hours of Sunday she, Laura, would be roused from sound sleep to entertain pyjamas and receive confidences, bestowed, as a dog bestows the stone he wishes you to throw for him, with circlings and shyings, and coy withdrawals, with a depositing of it at your feet, and a thinking better of it, and a hasty retreat, and an elaborate pretence of wishing to be unmolested, and of not knowing anything of any stone at all.

Justin did not miss her till he had put the trouble of setting up the bridge table , a collapsible affair that he had never noticed was easier to manage with laura at his elbow to keep down the legs that were down and to hold up the legs that were up himself .

But she had chosen to stultify herself. . . . She had sacrificed what self-respect, common sense, common honesty sometimes, ? . . .

Not even to Justin, only to the mean, selfish fear of losing him. . . . Not love but fear had guided her in all her dealings. . . . She had wanted him for her own, her very own: she had encouraged every tendency, every fault, that would bind her him . . . . How unfair, how cruelly unfair, she had been to Justin! . . .

The foxgloves and the sorrel swayed and shook above her and she pulled their freshness ’ sake them down to her , and let them spring free again, and then lay back once more, her lips besmeared with dew and pollen, her hands clasped under her head, and watched the mists, not rising from the earth but thinning and vanishing where they lay, and the grey surface of the corn warming to bronze-tipped green, and the dawn-light spreading like a smile across the sky, and had no answering smile for it, but turned where she lay, stopping her ears against the riot of the birds, hiding her face from the sun, and at last falling, for very weariness, into a cramped, uneasy drowse.

She put her head her cold hand , and then dropped it again, stiffening where she lay.

I’ll get you it .

He had said only yesterday that he wanted more blackcap eggs. . . . She jerked her knees herself and listened.

Dear Laura was merely pleased with herself because, as Justin would have wished her to do, she had put childish things , such as telling herself stories when she went to bed , deciding the colour of her eldest grandson ’s eyes , and talking to justin when he was not there an end .

She drew the box towards her and stirred her hand round among the eggs; then, lifting a handful, poured the other them idly from one palm .

She pulled open the doors one by one, sliding out the glass, and ran hollow her hand from hollow in the cotton-wool.

Her feet had already carried the door her , but at that sound she slipped back into her chair, white, speechless, waiting.

But a thought, not of the unrealized present, but of that dreamlike far past, remained with her, stirring exertion her mind .

She turned on her pillow and abandoned terror-a terror beyond the decencies herself .

She, when she could, sat with him, eternally knitting the army that must always be to her but a multiplication of justin socks , thinking of him and herself, and now, with new, bewildered thoughts, of Gran’papa.

Laura, undeniably in the wrong, had, by all unwritten rules, necessarily to pay aunt adela forfeit , to attend without protest to a criticism of her untidy room, to hang up skirts under Aunt Adela’s eye, to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust ornaments to the high-pitched ripple of Aunt Adela’s voice, and to respond cheerfully in the infrequent pauses.

Laura, undeniably in the wrong, had, by all unwritten rules, necessarily to pay forfeit to Aunt Adela, to attend without protest to a criticism of her untidy room, to hang up skirts under Aunt Adela’s eye, to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust the high-pitched ripple of aunt adela ’s voice ornaments , and to respond cheerfully in the infrequent pauses.

She may gae me to-France !

Well-and if he is killed and you are poor-you’ll be able to feed a child, and clothe it, and teach it to read, I suppose-if you can’t send eton it .

Laura handed the maid her basket , but she had not long to wait.

Cloud of the Lower Fifth, arriving for his half-term holiday and leaving chance no item of the program .

It smouldered, of course, flickering up occasionally into perplexed resentment: would never, I think-though Justin and Laura should miraculously adjust their differences-be completely extinguished; for it was not in Mrs. Cloud’s nature, so sweetly oblivious of sins against herself, ever to forgive a harshness or forget a kindness rendered to those she loved; but the hot ashes of it were hidden deep in her heart-she had found herself able, in time, to be reconciled, to pretend laura justice .

If only they had either of them seen fit to confide her the cause of their quarrel , she was sure that she could have helped them over it. . . . Justin was so much her own son that his reserve could not hurt her, but she thought Laura should have come to her. . . . She thought Laura owed her that. . . .

For, all the long week, she lived, fiercely as she denied herself it , in mad, fantastic expectation of that miracle.

Two days’ grace, or three, might be allowed her imaginary headache-but her on the fourth Brackenhurst clamoured for its indispensable Miss Valentine, and she must set out through by-ways to her Belgians and her babies, to lunch at the other end of the village, with an afternoon’s sewing to follow, and must keep her eyes bright and her tongue wagging to amuse her world the while.

For, after all her reckonings, it was Justin-Justin, taking like herself his tea-justin , whom she had not seen for nearly a year-justin his short cut through the woods , who was never going to speak to her again.

He was quite right: his mother would have kept him it hot till the crack of doom.

Laura thought she would leave him things : she knew by experience that if he did not want to talk nothing would make him: she did not think he was embarrassed, for he had always been too absorbed in himself to be self-conscious: therefore, if he talked, it would have some significance.

Yet she found that in his talk he was gradually and unwittingly explaining her himself .

On the third day he had gone to town to do his necessary shopping, and, in delighted extravagance, had brought back mrs. half Covent Garden

Timothy gave Laura a bad moment as she put bed him .

“Did you say uncle justin thank-you when you said good-night? ”

And he spoke-to the fire , to his own hands , rather than to the room, her-of certain things daily seen and heard and endured: spoke with a flatness of tone, a baldness of phrase, that, to her at least, underlined his facts as no eloquence could have done.

But she made the windy rain thudding at the windows no objection whatever: came downstairs to him with obliging readiness: sat listening with an air that might have been mistaken for satisfaction, .

Perhaps his mother would like to clean him them first?

Justin’s voice recalled her thoughts, shifted him them from herself .

He was explaining her himself , slowly, with naïve interest.

She raised his her eyes patiently, letting him see all he chose, before she dropped them again.

“I suppose--” His thoughts sent a standstill him with long strides up and down and up and down the room-brought him at last before Laura in her chair, thought-bound too, yet more at peace than he.