“I will! And when I’m dead I’ll hurt you worse!”
“Thank goodness, I shall be dead long before you, darling.”
“Huh! Emma says, ‘’Never know your luck.’” (Michael had been talking to Helen’s elderly, flat-faced maid.) “Lots of little boys die quite soon. So’ll I. Then you’ll see!”
Helen caught her breath and moved towards the door, but the wail of “Mummy! Mummy!” drew her back again, and the two wept together.
At ten years old, after two terms at a prep. school, something or somebody gave him the idea that his civil status was not quite regular. He attacked Helen on the subject, breaking down her stammered defences with the family directness.
“’Don’t believe a word of it,” he said, cheerily, at the end. “People wouldn’t have talked like they did if my people had been married. But don’t you bother, Auntie. I’ve found out all about my sort in English Hist’ry and the Shakespeare bits. There was William the Conqueror to begin with, and—oh, heaps more, and they all got on first-rate. ’Twon’t make any difference to you, my being that—will it?”
“As if anything could——” she began.
“All right. We won’t talk about it any more if it makes you cry.” He never mentioned the thing again of his own will, but when, two years later, he skilfully managed to have measles in the holidays, as his temperature went up to the appointed one hundred and four he muttered of nothing else, till Helen’s voice, piercing at last his delirium, reached him with assurance that nothing on earth or beyond could make any difference between them.
The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them. In due time Michael developed his own interests, which ran their courses and gave way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and increasing throughout. She repaid it with all that she had of affection or could command of counsel and money; and since Michael was no fool, the War took him just before what was like to have been a most promising career.