And that set me off in a brown study which even Susie seemed to fathom. She smiled understandingly and turned and inspected Dinkie, bent over his arithmetic, with an entirely new curiosity.
“I suppose that’s what every mother has to face, some day,” she said as she sat down beside me in front of the fire. 217
But it seemed a fire without warmth. Life, apparently, had brought me to another of its Great Divides. My boy had a secret apart from his mother. My son was no longer all mine.
Friday the Fifth
This morning at breakfast, when Dinkie and I were alone at the table, I crossed over to him and sat down beside him.
“Dinkie,” I said, with my hand on his tousled young head, “whom do you love best in all the world?”
“Mummy!” he said, looking me straight in the eye. And at that I drank in a deep breath.
“Are you sure?” I demanded.