bed, as he would have liked to do, he sat and waited. There was a tense silence. The clock ticked loudly.
“You’d better go to bed before your father comes in,” said the mother harshly. “And if you’re going to have anything to eat, you’d better get it.”
“I don’t want anything.”
It was his mother’s custom to bring him some trifle for supper on Friday night, the night of luxury for the colliers. He was too angry to go and find it in the pantry this night. This insulted her.
“If I wanted you to go to Selby on Friday night, I can imagine the scene,” said Mrs. Morel. “But you’re never too tired to go if she will come for you. Nay, you neither want to eat nor drink then.”
“I can’t let her go alone.”
“Can’t you? And why does she come?”
“Not because I ask her.”
“She doesn’t come without you want her——”
“Well, what if I do want her——” he replied.
“Why, nothing, if it was sensible or reasonable. But to go trapseing up there miles and miles in the mud, coming home at midnight, and got to go to Nottingham in the morning——”
“If I hadn’t, you’d be just the same.”
“Yes, I should, because there’s no sense in it. Is she so fascinating that you must follow her all that way?” Mrs. Morel was bitterly sarcastic. She sat still, with averted face, stroking with a rhythmic, jerked movement, the black sateen of her apron. It was a movement that hurt Paul to see.
“I do like her,” he said, “but——”
“Like her!” said Mrs. Morel, in the same biting tones. “It seems to me you like nothing and nobody else. There’s neither Annie, nor me, nor anyone now for you.”
“What nonsense, mother—you know I don’t love her—I—I tell you I don’t love her—she doesn’t even walk with my arm, because I don’t want her to.”
“Then why do you fly to her so often!”
“I do like to talk to her—I never said I didn’t. But I don’t love her.”
“Is there nobody else to talk to?”
“Not about the things we talk of. There’s lots of things that you’re not interested in, that——”
“What things?”
Mrs. Morel was so intense that Paul began to pant.
