talking to him. And she lost her thread.

She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was looking for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons.

‘Are my children all there?’ she asked him abruptly.

He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps.

‘I scarcely know them, except Gerald,’ he replied.

‘Gerald!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s the most wanting of them all. You’d never think it, to look at him now, would you?’

‘No,’ said Birkin.

The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at him heavily for some time.