Page 207 - sons-and-lovers

comforted the girl. Yet it was true, what he had said. He
hated her.
When they were going away, Mrs. Morel accompanied
them as far as Nottingham. It was a long way to Keston sta-
tion.
‘You know, mother,’ he said to her, ‘Gyp’s shallow. Noth-
ing goes deep with her.’
‘William, I WISH you wouldn’t say these things,’ said
Mrs. Morel, very uncomfortable for the girl who walked be-
side her.
‘But it doesn’t, mother. She’s very much in love with me
now, but if I died she’d have forgotten me in three months.’
Mrs. Morel was afraid. Her heart beat furiously, hearing
the quiet bitterness of her son’s last speech.
‘How do you know?’ she replied. ‘You DON’T know, and
therefore you’ve no right to say such a thing.’
‘He’s always saying these things!’ cried the girl.
‘In three months after I was buried you’d have some-
body else, and I should be forgotten,’ he said. ‘And that’s
your love!’
Mrs. Morel saw them into the train in Nottingham, then
she returned home.
‘There’s one comfort,’ she said to Paul—‘he’ll never have
any money to marry on, that I AM sure of. And so she’ll
save him that way.’
So she took cheer. Matters were not yet very desperate.
She firmly believed William would never marry his Gipsy.
She waited, and she kept Paul near to her.
All summer long William’s letters had a feverish tone; he

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