Mrs. Peyton reached home in the state of exhaustion¹ which follows on a physical struggle. It seemed to her as though her talk with Clemence Verney had been an actual combat, a measuring of wrist and eye. For a moment she was frightened at what she had done — she felt as though she had betrayed her son to the enemy. But before long she regained² her moral balance, and saw that she had merely shifted the conflict to the ground on which it could best be fought out — since the prize fought for was the natural battlefield. The reaction brought with it a sense of helplessness, a realization³ that she had let the issue pass out of her hold; but since, in the last analysis, it had never lain there, since it was above all needful that the determining touch should be given by any hand but hers, she presently found courage to subside⁴ into inaction. She had done all she could — even more, perhaps, than prudence⁵ warranted — and now she could but await passively the working of the forces she had set in motion.

For two days after her talk with Miss Verney she saw little of Dick. He went early to his office and came back late. He seemed less tired, more self-possessed, than during the first days after Darrow’s death; but there was a new inscrutableness in his manner, a note of reserve, of resistance almost, as though he had barricaded⁶ himself against her conjectures⁷. She had been struck by Miss Verney’s reply to the anxious asseveration that she had done nothing to influence Dick — “Nothing,” the girl had answered, “except to read his thoughts.” Mrs. Peyton shrank from this detection of a tacit interference with her son’s liberty of action. She longed — how passionately⁸ he would never know — to stand apart from him in this struggle between his two destinies, and it was almost a relief that he on his side should hold

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