"You sit here with us, Mother," Spencer begged. "I can do my sums much quicker. Marian doesn't have to do home work. She's just——"
"I do, too, have to do home work. The teacher said so."
"There, you shall, if you like." Catherine ruffled Spencer's hair. "Try not to disturb Father."
She sat there with them for an hour and more. Marian snuggled against her, showing her the pictures in her "suppulment'ry reading." Spencer bent over his work in a concentration directed toward the impressing of his sister, his cheeks growing pink, his hand clutched over his pencil. Although she sat so quietly, her outer attention given to the children, her deeper thoughts went scurrying and creeping up to the closed study door, away from it. He needn't have worked to-night. Don't be absurd. If he has a lecture to-morrow—he wants to shut himself away. Slowly her thoughts circled, like gulls above the water, concealing in their whirls the object which drew them.
"Muvver, does Spencer have to whisper his sums aloud?"
"Perhaps that helps him." Catherine smiled at Spencer's indignant face. "You may whisper your story, if you like."
What were they swooping over, those gull-thoughts? Better to scatter them and see. Not that he had missed the train; not even that he had not troubled to run in for a moment that afternoon; nor that he had chosen to see Miss Partridge. That might so easily be explained. No. Just that queer, investigating glance, that deliberate offhand manner, when he had told her. It set a wall between them.
The telephone rang distantly, behind the closed door. The children lifted their heads to listen. A rumble of Charles's voice. Then silence again.
When Spencer and Marian had laid away their books and gone to bed, Catherine returned to her seat at the empty table. I want him, she thought. But if I open his door and go in, then I become, in some way, a propitiator. Perhaps I only imagine all this. I am tired. She drew the pins from her hair and let the heavy coil slip over her shoulder. Elbows on the table, fingers cool and firm against her forehead, as if she might press order into her thoughts, she waited.