Then he kissed her passionately, and turned away sobbing.
“Wait a moment,” she said when he had smothered back his emotion and had put his hand again on the door. “I did forget one thing. Make no explanation—not to any one.”
“What about the governor?”
“Least of all to him. Your father will ask you not another question; he has promised me.”
“I say, Mother,” Basil said, flushing painfully, “you are a bit of a brick—aren’t you?”
“I am your mother, Basil,” she returned, smiling into his eyes. “Remember, not one word to any human creature. Promise me. Let it rest where it is forever—just with us.”
And there they left it—glad to be rid of it, as far as words went, but knowing that, waking or sleeping, neither could ever be rid of it in thought again. It was a poison cooked into their blood.
For years they did not speak of it again, except that Basil said when she came to him later with a cup of tea—he had slept through tiffin, and she would not have him called—“What about Ah Wong? She knows.”
His mother answered him proudly: “I trust Ah Wong. Ah Wong knows, of course—part at least. But it will be always precisely as if she knew nothing.”
Basil shrugged skeptically, sitting up among his pillows. And his mother put the tray down and left him a little hurriedly. There is little a woman finds harder to bear than a man’s ingratitude. Florence Gregory was ashamed of her son.