He then pushed her down by main force into an armchair and hurriedly handed her a cigarette and a lighted match.

“Now please be good, Mother darling!” he pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything when I’ve read it.”

He sat down in the opposite chair and tore open the letter. His mother puffed great rings of smoke into the air between them and surveyed him with glittering eyes⁠—with eyes that had in their brown depths an almost maudlin passion of affection.

Miss Selena Gault was forgotten.

The letter was written in pencil and in a handwriting as straggling and unformed as that of a little girl of ten. “Olwen would have composed a much more grown-up production,” he thought, as he read the following words: