Of helping his mother against her will he never heard any more. When his father returned that evening he had the same look of panic as on the previous day, followed by the same expression of relief at seeing the domestic life going on as usual. But he asked no questions, nor did he ever bring the subject up again. When a day or two later Tom explained to him that the powder had been blown away he merely nodded, letting the matter rest.
Autumn came on and Tom went to school at Bere. He liked the school. No longer a State ward, but the son of a man supposed to be of substance, he passed the tests inflicted by the savage snobbery of children. His quickness at sports helped him to a popularity justified by his good nature. With the teachers he was often forced to seem less intelligent than he was, so as to escape the odious soubriquet of "teacher's pet."
On the whole, the winter was the happiest he had so far known. It could have been altogether happy had it not been for the tragic situation of the Quidmores. After the brief improvement that had followed on his coming they had reacted to a mutual animosity even more intense. Each made him a confidant.
"God! it's all I can do to keep my hands off her," the soft drawl confessed. "If she was just to die of
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 a sickness, and me have nothing to do with it, I don't believe I'd be satis—" He held the sentence there as a matter of precaution. "What do you think of a woman who all the years you've known her has never done anything but whine, whine, whine, because you ain't givin' her what you promised?"
"And are you?" Tom asked, innocently.
"I give her what I can. She don't tempt me to do anything extra. Say, now, would she tempt you?"
Tom did his best to take the grown-up, man-to-man tone in which he was addressed. "I think she's awful tempting, if you take her the right way."
To take her the right way, to take him also the right way, was the boy's chief concern throughout the winter. To get them to take each other the right way was beyond him.
"So long as he goes outside his home," Mrs. Quidmore declared, with an euphemism of which the boy did not get the significance, "I'll make him suffer for it."
"But, ma, he can't stay home all the time."
"Oh, don't tell me that you don't know what I mean! If you wasn't on his side you'd have found out for me long ago who the woman is. Just tell me that—"
"And what would you do?"
"I'd kill her, I think, if I got the chance."
"Oh, but ma!"
She brandished the knife with which she was cutting cold ham for the supper. "I would! I would!"
"But you wouldn't if I asked you not to, would you, ma?"
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The knife fell with a despairing movement of the hand. "Oh, I don't suppose I should do it at all. But he ought to love me."
"Can he make himself love you, ma?"
The ingenuous question went so close to the point that she could only dodge it. "Why shouldn't he? I'm his wife, ain't I?"
The challenge brought out another of the mysteries which surrounded marriage, as a penumbra fringes the moon on a cloudy night. When his father next reverted to the theme, while driving back from market, the penumbra became denser.
"Say, boy, don't you go to thinking that the first time you fall in love with a pretty face it's goin' to be for life. That's where the devil sets his snare for men. Eight or ten years from now you'll see some girl, and then the devil'll be after you. He'll try to make you think that if you don't marry that girl your one and only chance'll come and go. And when he does, my boy, just think o' me."
"Think of you—what about?"
The sweetness of the tone took from the answer anything like bitterness. "Think how I got pinched. Gosh, when I look back and remember that I was as crazy to get her as a pup to catch a squir'l I can't believe it was me. But don't forget what I'm tellin' you. No fellow ought to think of bein' married till he's over thirty. He can't be expected to know what he'll love permanent till then."
It was the perpetual enigma. "But you always love your wife when you're married to her, don't you?"
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The answer was in loud satirical laughter, with the observation that Tom was the limit for innocence.
Quite as disturbing as questions of love and marriage were those relating to the fact that the man who had done very well as a hatter was a failure as a market gardener.
"A hell of a business, this is! Rothschild and Rockefeller together couldn't make it pay. Gosh, how I hate it! Hate everything about it, and home worst of all. Know a little woman that if she'd light out with me...."
In different keys and conjunctions these confidences were made to the boy all through the winter. If they did not distress him more it was because they were over his head. The disputes of the gods affect mortals only indirectly. When Jupiter and Juno disagree men feel that they can leave it to Olympus to manage its own affairs. So to a boy of twelve the cares of his elders pass in spheres to which he has little or no access. In spite of his knowledge that their situation was desperate, the couple who had adopted him were mighty beings to Tom Quidmore, with resources to meet all needs. To be so went with being grown up and, in a general way, with being independent.
Their unbosomings worried him; they did not do more. When they were over he could dismiss them from his mind. His own concerns, his lessons, his games, his friends and enemies in school, and the vague objective of becoming "something big," were his matters of importance. Martin and Anna Quidmore cared for him so much, though each with a dash
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 of selfishness, that his inner detachment from them both would have caused them pain.
And yet it was because of this detachment that he was able, in some sense, to get through the winter happily. Whatever might have hurt him most passed on the kind of Mount Olympus where grown-up people had their incredible interests. Told, as he always was, that he couldn't understand them, he was willing to drop them at that till they were forced on him again. As spring was passing into summer they were forced on him less persistently; and then one day, quite unexpectedly, he struck the beginning of the end.
It was a Saturday. As there was no school that day he had driven in on the truck with his father, to market a load of lettuce and early spinach. On returning through Bere in the latter part of the forenoon, Quidmore stopped at the druggist's.
"Jump down and have an ice cream soda. I'll leave the lorry here, and come back to you. Errand to do in the village."
The words had been repeated so often that for these excursions they had come to be a formula. By this time Tom knew the errand to be at Bertha's house, which was indirectly opposite. Seated at a table in the window, absorbing his cool, flavored drink through a pair of straws, he could see his father run up the steps and enter, running down again when he came out. Further than the fact that there was something regrettable in the visit, something to be concealed when he went home, the boy's mind did not work.
The tragedy of that morning was that, as he was
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 enjoying himself thus, the runabout, driven by one of the hired men, glided up to the door, and Mrs. Quidmore, dressed for shopping, and very alert, sprang out. As she rarely came into Bere, and almost never in the morning when she had her work to do, Tom's surprise was tinged at once with fear. Recognizing the lorry, Mrs. Quidmore rushed into the drug store. Except for the young man, wearing a white coat, who tended it, the long narrow slit was empty. As he peeped above his glass, with the two straws between his lips, Tom saw the wrath of the wronged when close on the track of the wrong-doer. Wheeling round, she caught him looking conscious and guilty.
"Oh! So you're here? Where is he?"
Tom answered truthfully. "H............