She hesitated, and then with a touch of reluctance continued:
"I succeeded until a month or so ago. But a month or so ago the secrets came. Oh, I know him so well. He is trying to hide that there are any secrets lest his reticence should hurt me. But we have been so much together, so much to each other—how should I not know?" And again she leaned forward with her hands clasped tightly together upon her knees and a look of great distress lying like a shadow upon her face. "The first secrets," she continued, and her voice trembled, "I suppose they are always bitter to a mother. But since I have nothing but Dick they hurt me more deeply than is perhaps reasonable"; and she turned towards her companion with a poor attempt at a smile.
"What sort of secrets?" asked Dewes. "What is he hiding?"
"I don't know," she replied, and she repeated the words, adding to them slowly others. "I don't know—and I am a little afraid to guess. But I know that something is stirring in his mind, something is—" and she paused, and into her eyes there came a look of actual terror—"something is calling him. He goes alone up on to the top of the Downs, and stays there alone for hours. I have seen him. I have come upon him unawares lying on the grass with his face towards the sea, his lips parted, and his eyes strained, his face absorbed. He has been so lost in dreams that I have come close to him through the grass and stood beside him and spoken to him before he grew aware that anyone was near."
"Perhaps he wants to be a sailor," suggested Dewes.
"No, I do not think it is that," Sybil answered quietly. "If it were so, he would have told me."
"Yes," Dewes admitted. "Yes, he would have told you. I was wrong."
"You see," Mrs. Linforth continued, as though Dewes had not interrupted, "it is not natural for a boy at his age to want to be alone, is it? I don't think it is good either. It is not natural for a boy of his age to be thoughtful. I am not sure that that is good. I am, to tell you the truth, very troubled."
Dewes looked at her sharply. Something, not so much in her words as in the careful, slow manner of her speech, warned him that she was not telling him all of the trouble which oppressed her. Her fears were more definite than she had given him as yet reason to understand. There was not enough in what she had said to account for the tense clasp of her hands, and the glint of terror in her eyes.
"Anyhow, he's going to the big school next term," he said; "that is, if you haven't changed your mind since you last wrote to me, and I hope you haven't changed your mind. All that he wants really," the Colonel added with unconscious cruelty, "is companions of his own age. He passed in well, didn't he?"