Secret Bread

t necessarily because of any import attached to them; often, in the irrational workings of memory, very vital a

iance that he retained it so clearly in after years, and not for any strategic importance, which at the time would not have impressed him. Yet,

rchelaus was a terrific being whom he held in awe for his feats of strength, but about whom he was beginning to be conscious of a certain inferiority. Tom he dreaded for his powers of sarc

the emotions. He knew nothing about them and they made him uncomfortable. For a long while Ishmael failed to discover this. He flung himself upon John-James, and felt him satisfactorily solid and worried no more on the matter. But when, in the natural course of development, his mind began to feel pain as well as discomfort at the chill which met him from his family, he turned to his sure support for help in this also, he found a blank. John-James would take him fishing, save his pastry for him, stand between him and harshness, but he would not, because he could not, give him love to live on. If he had one outward-flowing sensation it was towards his sister Vassilissa. Ishmael was just the "lil' un" and a trouble because the cause of trouble, but Vassie was something so infinitely quicker, cleverer, more elusive than himself that she stood to John-James for wh

fter that the Parson had set him up and everyone had cheered him, and Archelaus had not dared do anything to spoil it. He had been called "the little master"-well, if last night, why not to-day? Katie would probably be cleaning up when he arrived, but she would see him and call out. "Here's the little master come back!" ... and his mother would ask him whether he would like a piece of cake. So he went on planning, after the dramatic manner of all imaginative children. He would be very nice to them all, but he too would be different, now that he knew who he was. For the Parson, finding him intensely puzzled, had partially explained to him that morning. Questions of legitimacy, and any reflection on his mother, Boase had omitted for the time bein

child promised, proud of the confidence, his imagination thrilled by the romance that had come to him, and so, although he meant to be quite nice to everyone, there was a tinge of kindly pity in the manner he pict

he came on his mother in the back kitchen. The piled dresser showed a muddle of unwashed dishes, and the floor was gritty with mud. Annie looked, and was, dirty with exertion; and even the steam that w

had imagined; it went deeper than mere speech. As he entered his mother came over to him, and, tilting up his chin, searched h

knew it was not to him

t him as He accepte

usually went with one of her storming fits, but now she was quiet, though t

' by the grace of God mine's to be the hand that'll pluck 'ee. Yo

ser. "Thee mustn't be afeared of thy mawther, my worm," she murmured, her voice more coaxing than he had ever heard it; "we're gwain

made. Neither, his child's true instinct told him, was it affection suddenly awakened in her. He cast about vainly for what it might mean. Presently he went into the washhouse, where Katie and another woman were busy; they took scant notice of him, but went on discussing the fact that

the porch that was Ishmael's. And there, on her knees by the bed, she prayed silently, her eyes rolling till a slather of w

Squire, but since her elevation to the position of a widow-woman she had undergone "conversion." What she had hitherto accepted, much as her farm beasts accepted it-as a clamorous necessity-she now held to be a thing

which the lawyer had dallied. Her sense of her position was flattered and a glimpse of a yet more consequential one flashed before her, but no thrill went with it. It was in the grip of what she would have thought a very dif

eyes in an ecstasy of prayer. It was very dim still in the house, but without the first faint pallor of the dawn was growing, and against it every solid object showed distinct and black. And, opening her eyes, Annie saw, silhouetted darkly with the precision of sculpture against the paling sky, the figures of Archelaus and a girl. He was half-lifting

differently. If she had merely heard of the matter her lack of visualising power would have saved her from sensation; it was the sight of those two striving figures which had made her feel. She moaned that her baby son had grown up and away from her, and she agonised over his s

it needed something keenly sharpened to make Annie's dulled sensitiveness feel a shock. She raged that her son was taken from her, but she would have felt indignant anger if the girl had denied her lovely boy. And behind her sense of loss in Archelaus, behind her terror that he was being led in the way of destruction, there lurked, unknown to her, another anger, an anger aga

ight for her and her generation, but incomprehensible in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning to work out in her children. She su

roportions of the chief thing for which to live. She saw herself in it, and with her, by a flash of inspiration, not the fair eldest-born who had failed her, but the youngest-he whom she could flaunt in the face of God and men. Some receptacle for passion Annie had to have, and being an uneducated woman, it had to be a personal one. Archelaus had gone beyond her clutch, Tom she knew would evad

his foolish little plans of a new importance,