Hopkinsville,
Ontario,
April 4th.
My dear Father,

Thank you very much for the check you sent me. I am hoping very much that the milk business will turn out as well as I hope. I now owe you £420. Do you want me to send you a formal I.O.U.? Or will this acknowledgment by letter be enough?

Your affectionate son,
Geoffrey.

It was strange that Jemmie should never have mentioned that he was giving Geoffrey money. And stranger still that he should keep his son's letter with the receipted bills of hatters and hosiers. Perhaps there were other letters. Mary examined again more carefully the recent files. Yes, here was another that spoke of receiving money two years later, written from Winnipeg. And here, why here in 1909 was a letter from London!

45 Almond Terrace,
Wood Green,
November 15.
My dear Father,

Thank you very much for the £100 which brings up my debt to £930. I shouldn't have bothered you again, but the expenses of getting back from Canada and the birth of our little girl have made things rather difficult. I am going in for the cinematographic business which from what I can see looks like being the business of the future. I've got a job as studio manager with a new firm who I hope will prove to have some staying power. I don't think any good purpose would be served by my coming to see you. I've kept out of your way for so long now that it's better to keep out of the family for good. It would be useless to pretend that Mary doesn't feel a certain amount of resentment, and now that we have our little girl we get on very happily. Please do not misunderstand my motive in writing to you like this. If it was only you I might take a different course. But there is Mother to be considered. She would feel—quite rightly from her point of view—that the baby ought to be brought up in different surroundings. This would only cause bad feeling between her and Mary, which I would not like. I haven't made such a terrific success of my life, and so I am perhaps a bit oversensitive. It seems very ungrateful to write like this after your kindness, but I hope you will understand that I'm trying to act for the best. I am sorry to hear that you've not been feeling quite yourself lately. I hope it's nothing more than the effect of the beastly weather we've been having. I'm glad to be back in England again. I don't know what made me choose Canada as a country to settle in.

Your affectionate son,
Geoffrey.

Geoffrey had written this only a year ago. Perhaps he was still at the same address. Mary felt inclined to order the car so that she could drive immediately to Wood Green, wherever Wood Green was, and find out. She had risen from the table before she remembered that Muriel had taken the car for the afternoon. But to-morrow she would go. Nothing should stop her to-morrow.

Poor old Jemmie, he must have been pining for his son. He must have had a vague presentiment of his last illness. And how extraordinary that he should have said nothing about the birth of Geoffrey's little girl. To have lain there all these months silent about that great event! It was strange too that he should not have left any money to Geoffrey. Perhaps he had known when he left in his will everything to her that she would find out from his papers about Geoffrey and the little girl, and had trusted to her to make some provision for them. It might be that all those years he had been anxious for a reconciliation and that he had waited for a word from herself to give him an excuse to make the first move. He would have been too proud of his own accord to propose the reconciliation; but if he could have salved his pride by pretending that he was receiving Geoffrey back into the family on her account, there was no doubt that he would have done so. Oh, it was clearly her duty to go to-morrow and find out if Geoffrey was still in Wood Green. It was her duty to the dead man and to her own self. Few might be the gray hairs of her head, but heavy had been the frost upon her heart all these years of middle-age. The more she thought about it, the more remarkable appeared Jemmie's secretiveness. What could have been at the back of his mind? To be sure, when first Geoffrey married, it was she who had been of all the bitterest against him. But there had been some justification then. She had not stayed implacable. Yet she had never suggested a reconciliation, which it was her place to do. Jemmie might be pardoned for supposing that she did not want one. But what a pity! He would have died more happily if he had been friends at the last with the only son left to him. How much she hoped that he could be looking down from that mysterious hinterland of death, and that he might behold her setting out to-morrow on her mission of good-will.

How far had she got with the papers? Oh yes, 1904. 1903? Nothing from Geoffrey in 1903. Nothing from him in 1902 either. She wished that Jemmie had kept his first letters from Canada, for there must have been earlier letters. Those first hundreds of pounds must have been begged for with tales of misfortune in Canada. Or had Geoffrey written casually in the beginning as he used to write to her from Oxford for a hundred pounds? Perhaps that was the reason why his father had always spoken bitterly of him in those first years of the marriage. 1901. Mary turned pale. Here was the bill for Richard's uniform. Received with compliments and thanks ... the money that equipped her boy to be killed. The paper with its royal warrants was as fresh as the day on which it was printed. But Richard! Her Richard! What was Richard now? And here in the file for 1900 was the bill for Richard's uniform as a cadet at Sandhurst. All these years going backward from this date held something of Richard. 1899? White waistcoats for Richard when he got into Pop at Eton. How delighted he had been! 1898? 1897? 1896? Tophats for Richard every year. 1895? The right kind of Eton jacket, "because a chap at my private school told me to be jolly careful about that, mother." And Jemmie had remembered from his own Eton days how important it was to be jolly careful about that. 1894? School fees. 1893? Richard's straw hat with the second eleven ribbon of his private school. That hot summer of 1893 when they had moved in to High Corner for the holidays. 1892? School fees, and the bill for a bicycle in which Jemmie had invested to reduce his growing stoutness. That bicycle with cushion tires of which Jemmie had been so proud, but which almost immediately became old-fashioned by the invention of pneumatic tires. How Richard and Geoffrey had scorned his offer of it to them! They would not be seen dead on such an out-of-date old boneshaker; and two years later Richard had been given £7 10s. to buy from a friend at school a second-hand one with huge pneumatic tires. His first big present. It had made both him and his mother feel so very old.

1891? The doctor's bill when Richard had diphtheria. That was the year when she might have changed the whole course of her life. Ought she to have confessed the impulse of that May evening to Jemmie before he died? From the file of bills dropped a lilac-hued and even after twenty years still faintly lilac-scented scrap of notepaper.

Frivolity Theater,
May? Wednesday.
Darling old Podge,

I can get away to-night, so you must come. Thanks everso for the duck of a ring. My eye, won't it dazzle some of the mashers in the front row when we open next week. Lots of love.

From
Maudie.