Winnie Childs, the Shop Girl

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

The subject was broached to mother, and mother did not object. She had learned long ago, when she was first married to Peter, never to object to anything that he proposed. When she smiled and agreed with every suggestion she was a dear little woman, and so she had spent her existence in being a dear little woman until her hair turned white. With her sunny nature, it had not needed a very great effort; but sometimes, since Peter had begun to grow up, he had dimly fancied a look of wistfulness in her ever-young blue eyes—eyes of a girl gazing out from the round, rosy-apple face of a middle-aged woman.

She was always the same in her ways and manner, if it could be called manner: comfortable and comforting, contented with life as it was, happy in her children, and putting up gently with her husband; but—when you had said good-bye to her you remembered the look which always changed instantly into a smile when it met yours. You remembered, and seemed to see another woman hovering wraithlike behind mother's plump figure, as she sat contentedly crocheting those endless strips of trimming for towels and things—mother as she might have been if no dominating nature had ringed hers in with an iron fence.

When Peter was up the White Nile, in elephant and lion land, he used suddenly, mysteriously, to see an irrelevant

vision of his mother just stretching out plump arms to say good-bye to him in his own room which he had furnished with the mahogany odds and ends that had started her bridal housekeeping. She had smiled and had not seemed to mind very much his going—not half as much as a hen mother minds its duckling's first dash into water. And yet her eyes—There are some things it hurts and at the same time warms your heart to think of at the other end of the world.

Peter had gone up the White Nile to shoot big game; but when he met it face to face, on a social equality, so to speak, he wondered how he could ever have harboured so monstrously caddish a design. He found the animals he had thought he wanted to kill so much handsomer and more important than himself that he felt like begging the alleged "game's" pardon for calling on it without invitation in its country home (as if he'd been a book agent), and bowed himself away with only a few photographs to remember it by. While Ena was working up conversations to the point of mentioning "my brother, who is such a great shot, you know, and is shooting big game in Africa," Peter's only shots were snapshots, and he was too stupidly conscientious to atone for his weakness by obtaining elephant tusks and lion skins with coins instead of bullets.

He wished he had saved Egypt and its temples for his honeymoon, in case he should ever find exactly the right girl, for the mystery and wonder made him sad because he had nobody to feel it with him. It was the same in India and all the East, and there were thousands of thoughts imprisoned in his breast (which he hardly understood and

dared not let escape) by the time he arrived in England to meet Ena.

They were still struggling in prison when he went on board the Monarchic, but there a light shone fitfully through the keyhole of the cell. It was a beautiful light, almost beautiful enough to be a light Peter had read and dreamed of which was said never to shine on land or sea. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, it went out. The prison, full of thoughts, was left a place of dark confusion.

This was the inner state of Peter Rolls, Jr., when he arrived at home after his long absence. But outwardly he appeared to be much as usual, and was so nice to the Irish guests that Ena was grateful, though never remorseful. Indeed, she had so much to think about that she almost forgot her little act of diplomacy in eliminating an undesirable sister-in-law.

She was on tenterhooks lest Lord Raygan and his mother and sister should be finding the ménage at Sea Gull Manor "all wrong," and laughing secretly at father and mother. If there had been that fear about the dressmaker's model on top of the rest of her anxieties she would have broken down with nervous prostration. But, thanks to her for saving him (without his knowledge), Peter seemed to have got over his silliness and was able to stand by her like a brick.