“Ah, Glory be to God, the consecrated hands,” she cried, covering her mouth with her fingers, mocking him with her dismay. She screamed with laughter, squaring back on the floor with her knees spread out and her eyes staring up from under a scalding water of pain and rage.

“I forgot about your hands, son. Wasn’t it naughty of me. Wasn’t it naughty. Such impertinence, touching the almighty hands of a priest. I know you dislike me to touch your precious hands. Oh, I know it very well.”

“Not only you, Mother. Anyone, you know very well. A priest’s hands, as you know very well —”

“Oh, I know, I know. I knew it before you were born. Don’t harp on it now. All I wanted was your blessing, John. That’s all, that’s all I wanted.”

She snapped at him pettishly, scrambling to her feet, very much exerted, brushing off her dress.

“I’ll give you my blessing, Mother, a hundred blessings. There’s nothing I wouldn’t give you, if I had it to give. Do you want me to give you a blessing?”

She straightened like a housekeeper, with her hands under her chest.

“Never mind about that, now,” she said sharply. “But hurry yourself and come on down to the table.”

She came a step toward him.

She said, “Oh, love, what’s the matter with me. I’m all nerves. Don’t mind what I say.”

“I’m all to blame, Mother,” he said hurriedly. “I’ll be down before you have the cloth on the table.”

From the dining-room window she saw, as she had earlier in the day, that the laburnum tree in the back garden had come to full bloom. She smiled hardly to see it, the generous little tree, a furious yellow, a million blossoms, lifting itself as near to glory as color could bring it. That spindly trunk, thin as a leg, was glorious for them every summer, boiling in the sun with smell and color. She had to smile, knowing the look of the shapely little blossoms, each one as yellow as the next, the petals of them unusually smooth, to see and to rub. Her fingertips tingled, and she caressed the complicated lace of her best cloth, spread on the table for John.