So they would have remained, but the mother bent forward, thrusting herself between them in her terrible jealousy.

“How does my sonny feel now?” she asked, curbing her frenzy with an effort that almost killed her, into a tone of gentle ordinariness.

At this, Roddy only moved his head restlessly, searching past his mother with feeble impatience for his father’s lost face.

“How’s my sonny?” she repeated, – this time a fine jet of her agony breaking through in her voice.

“Much better, thank you.”

Roddy spoke with the politeness he used to strangers. And again he sought his father’s eyes.

Trissie turned away. Her face was like some crude, grinning mask of tragedy.

But the child had scarcely spoken, before consciousness flickered out again. An hour … two hours of unbroken stuper followed, do what they would. And then the small, square finger tips began to curve strangely outwards like young leaves that are too near a flame. And he grew cold. And one long, long breath was the last he would ever draw.

His mother, her eyes wide and unseeing, stayed by the dead boy. And the father, having composed the small limbs, wandered slowly from the room.

III

It was on the night before the burial that Trissie found relief in a stream of incoherent speech which seemed as though it had been pent up for ages and now could never have an end.

Edwin, she told Joanna, had gone out, and he would probably walk the streets till morning, as he had done many a time before. This was not their first trouble. What else indeed but trouble had they known these many years?

She sat on the little rocking-chair in the archway room that midnight, and her story – or what she thought was her story – came from her in a bitter confusion of words.

When all had been said, Joanna knew little more about the Moons than she had already gathered half-consciously by living with them. She learned indeed for the first time that Moon was not their real name, and that the name they had forgone was one well thought of in a northern county where once they had lived prosperously. But what Edwin had done – saving that it had been an act of criminal folly by which he had nothing to gain and everything to lose – all Trissie’s incontinence did not disclose. He had done it, declared Trissie, when he was not himself. For he had never been himself since the day when his pet Edvina, from being a lovely, lively child of two, had within an hour become the thing she now was. Was it any wonder if crazed by this blow he had thought for a time that certain babies were better not to be born into the world at all? Be that as it might, such thoughts had led to a disaster from which his life and hers had never recovered. Ill luck had dogged them ever since.