She had indeed needed to be told: the surprise was complete and overwhelming. She sat silent under it, her hands trembling in his, till the blood mounted to his face and she felt his confident grasp relax.

“You didn’t guess it, then?” he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from her.

“No; I didn’t guess it,” she confessed in a dead-level voice.

He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive. “And you haven’t a word to say to me? Mother!” he adjured her.

She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. “Dick! Dear Dick!” she murmured.

“She imagines you don’t like her; she says she’s always felt it. And yet she owns you’ve been delightful, that you’ve tried to make friends with her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have this uncertainty over, and that you’d actually been trying to help me, to put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide.”

“I?”

“By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her.”

His mother’s hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the suffocating rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement of fate. For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened; and as her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely, was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term. Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the astuteness of the girl’s policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in Dick’s future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.

So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was because no other bribe had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw with a throb of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow’s death had held to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected from it by the first hint of Clemence Verney’s connivance. Kate had not miscalculated: things had happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl’s approval his act had taken an odious look. He had recoiled from it, and it was to revive his flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the meshes of her surrender.

Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy’s face, the suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What right had she to stand in Dick’s light? Who was she to decide between his code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.

“She’ll be the making of me, you know, mother,” he said, as they leaned together. “She’ll put new life in me — she’ll help me get my second wind. Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and you simply ............