“Come, my boy,” said his mother. “I’m sure it’s time you went to bed.”
He stood with the pink against his lips.
“I shall break off with Miriam, mother,” he answered calmly.
She looked up at him over her spectacles. He was staring back at her, unswerving. She met his eyes for a moment, then took off her glasses. He was white. The male was up in him, dominant. She did not want to see him too clearly.
“But I thought——” she began.
“Well,” he answered, “I don’t love her. I don’t want to marry her—so I shall have done.”
“But,” exclaimed his mother, amazed, “I thought lately you had made up your mind to have her, and so I said nothing.”
“I had—I wanted to—but now I don’t want. It’s no good. I shall break off on Sunday. I ought to, oughtn’t I?”
“You know best. You know I said so long ago.”
“I can’t help that now. I shall break off on Sunday.”
“Well,” said his mother, “I think it will be best. But lately I decided you had made up your mind to have her, so I said nothing, and should have said nothing. But I say as I have always said, I don’t think she is suited to you.”
“On Sunday I break off,” he said, smelling the pink. He put the flower in his mouth. Unthinking, he bared his teeth, closed them on the blossom slowly, and had a mouthful of petals. These he spat into the fire, kissed his mother, and went to bed.
On Sunday he went up to the farm in the early afternoon. He had written Miriam that they would walk over the fields to Hucknall. His mother was very tender with him. He said nothing. But she saw the effort it was costing. The peculiar set look on his face stilled her.
“Never mind, my son,” she said. “You will be so much better when it is all over.”
Paul glanced swiftly at his mother in surprise and resentment. He did not want sympathy.
Miriam met him at the lane-end. She was wearing a new dress of figured muslin that had short sleeves. Those short sleeves, and Miriam’s brown-skinned arms beneath them—such pitiful, resigned arms—gave him so much pain that they helped to make him cruel. She had made herself look so beautiful and fresh for him. She seemed to blossom for him alone. Every time he looked at her—a mature young woman now, and beautiful in her new dress—it hurt so much that his
