He discovered that there were people in the world who could make scenes without noise. They were like the crocodiles he had met on his visit to the Zoo, lying malignantly inert in their oily water. But one twitch of the tail, one blink of a lightless eye, was more terrifying than the roar of a lion.

No one made a noise in Christine's home. The two sisters looked at Robert as though he were a small but disagreeable smell that they tried politely to ignore. They asked him if he wanted a second helping in voices of glacial courtesy. They said things to each other and at Christine which were quiet and deadly as the rustle of a snake in the grass. Robert had never fled from his father as he fled from their restrained disgust. He had never been more aware of storm than in the smother of the heavily carpeted, decorously silent rooms. It broke, three days later, not with thunder and lightning, but with the brief malicious rattle of a machine-gun.

"You ought not to have brought him here. You have no pride. But, then, you never had. At least some consideration for our feelings might have been expected. We have suffered enough. If you knew what people said-- Mrs. Stonehouse has been talking. She offered to take the child. As his natural guardian she had the right. An unpardonable, undignified interference--"

Christine hardly answered. Her fragile face wore the look of quiet obstinacy which had braved James Stonehouse and the worst disasters. Robert had seen it too often not to understand. But now his father was dead, and instead; inexplicably, he had become the source of trouble. He disgraced Christine. Her people hated her because she was good to him. He felt the shame of it all over him like a horrible kind of uncleanliness, and beneath the shame a burning sense of wrong. He hid in dark places. He refused to answer even when Christine called him. He skulked miserably past Christine's sisters when he met them in the passage. He scowled at them, his head down, like a hobbled, angry little bull. And Christine's sisters drew in their nostrils in a last genteel effort at self-control.

Christine packed his trunk with ragged odds and ends of clothing, and they made a long journey to No. 14, Acacia Grove, where Christine had taken two furnished rooms and a scullery, which served also as kitchen and bath-room. Acacia Grove was the deformed extremity of a misbegotten suburb. There were five acacia trees planted on either side of the unfinished roadway, but they had been blighted in their youth, and their branches were spinsterish and threadbare. Behind the houses were a few dingy fields, and then a biscuit factory, an obscene, congested-looking building with belching chimneys.

Every morning at nine o'clock Robert walked with Christine to the corner of the road, and a jolly, red-faced 'bus, rollicking through the neighbourhood like a slightly intoxicated reveller who has landed by mistake in a gathering of Decayed Gentlefolk, carried her off citywards, and at dusk returned her again, grey and worn, with wisps of tired brown hair hanging about her face and bundles of solemn letters and folded parchment documents bulging from her dispatch-case. Then she and Robert shopped together at the Stores, and afterwards she cooked over a gas-jet in the scullery, and they had supper together, almost in the dark, but very peacefully.

It was too peaceful. One couldn't believe in it. When supper was over Robert washed up and Christine uncovered the decrepit, second-hand typewriter which she had bought, and began to copy from the letters, bending lower and lower over the crabbed writing and sighing deeply and impatiently as her fingers blundered at the keys. On odd nights, when there was no copying to be done, she tried to teach Robert his letters and words of one syllable, but they were both too tired, and he yawned and kicked the table and was cross and stupid with sleepiness. At nine o'clock he washed himself cautiously and crept into the little bed beside her big one and lay curled up, listening to the reassuring click-click of the typewriter, until suddenly it was broad daylight again, and there was Christine getting breakfast.

In the day-time Robert played ball in the quiet street or sat with his elbows on the window-sill and watched the people go in and out of the houses opposite. The people were grey and furtive-looking, as though they were afraid of attracting the notice of some dangerous monster and had tried to take on the colour of their surroundings in self-protection. They seemed to ask nothing more for themselves than that they should be forgotten. Robert knew how they felt. He felt like that himself. He was never sure that he was really safe. He dared not ask questions lest he should find out that his father wasn't dead after all, or that they were on the brink of some new convulsion. He did not even ask where Christine went in the day-time, or what had become of Edith, or where their money came from. He clung desperately to an ignorance which allowed him to believe that he and Christine would always live like this, quietly and happily. When the landlady's shadow came heavy-footed up the stairs, he hid himself and stuffed his fingers in his ears lest he should hear her threaten them with instant expulsion. (It was incredible that she and Christine should be talking amicably about the weather.) Or when they went to the butcher's, he hung behind in dread anticipation of the red-faced man's insolent "And what about that there little account of ours, Ma'am?" But the red-faced man smiled ingratiatingly and patted him on the back and called him a fine young fellow. Christine counted out her money at the desk. It made Robert dizzy with joy and pride to see her pay her bill, and tears came into his throat and nearly choked him. On the way home he behaved abominably, chased cats or threw stones with a reckless disregard for their neighbours' windows, and Christine, looking into his flushed, excited face, had a movement that was like the shadow of his own secret fear.

"Robert, Robert, don't be so wild. You might hurt yourself-or someone else. It frightens me."

And then at once he walked quietly beside her, chilled and dispirited. At any moment the new-found commonplaces might drop from him, and everyone would find out-the neighbours who nodded kindly and the tradespeople who bowed them out of their shops-just as Francey and the Banditti had found out-and turn away from him, ashamed and sorry.

He did not think of Francey very often. For when he did it was almost always in those last moments together that he remembered her-the Francey who was too strong for him, the Francey who knew that he was a nasty little boy who couldn't even beat a girl-who told lies-the Francey who despised him. And then it was as though his body had been bruised afresh from head to foot. But he still had her handkerchief. He even kept it hidden from Christine lest she should insist on washing it. For by now it was incredibly dirty.

In the day-time he never thought of his father at all. But in his sleep one nightmare returned repeatedly. It never varied; it was definite and horrible. In it his father, grown to demonic proportions, towered over Christine's huddled body, his eyes terrible, his fists clenched and raised to strike. Then in that moment, at the very height of his awful fear and helpless hatred, the wonderful truth burst upon Robert, and he danced gleefully, full of cruel triumph, about the black, suddenly impotent figure, shouting:

"You can't-you're dead-you're dead-you can't--"

And then he would wake up with a hideous start, sweating, his eyes hot with unshed tears, and Christine's hand would come to him out of the darkness and clasp his in reassuring firmness.

There was another dream. Or, rather, it was half a dream and half one of these stories that he told himself just before he fell asleep. It came to him at dusk when he stood at the gate and waited for Christine to come home. In the long day of silent games he had lost touch, little by little, with reality. Hunger had made him faint and drowsy. Things changed, became unfamiliar, fantastic. Between the stunted trees he could see the afterglow of the sunset like the reflection of a blazing city. The road then was full of silence and shadow. The drab outlines grew faint and the mean houses were merged into the vaster shapes of night. Robert waited, motionless, breathless. He was sure that something was coming to him down the path of fading light. He did not know what it was. Once, indeed, it had been Francey, with her queer dancing step, her hair flying about her head like a flock of little red-brown birds. She had hovered before him, on tiptoe, as though the next gust of wind would blow her on her way down the street, and looked at him. They had not spoken, but he had seen in her eyes how sorry she was that she had not understood. And a warm content had flowed over him. All the sore, aching places were healed and comforted.

But that had been only once. And then he wasn't sure that he hadn't made it up. At all other times the thing was outside himself too strange to have been imagined. It shook him from head to foot with dread and longing. He wanted to run to meet it, to plunge into it, reckless and shouting, as into a warm, dancing, summer sea. And yet it menaced him. It was of fire and colour, of the rumble and thud of armies, of laughter and singing and distant broken music. It was all just round the comer. If he hurried he would see it, lose himself in it, march to the tune he could never quite catch. But he was afraid, and whilst he tried to make up his mind the light faded. The sounds died. After all, it was only Christine, trudging wearily through the dusk.

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