Page 488 - sons-and-lovers

titute, if he told his mother.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and she is coming to tea on Sunday.’
‘To your house?’
‘Yes; I want mater to see her.’
‘Ah!’
There was a silence. Things had gone quicker than she
thought. She felt a sudden bitterness that he could leave her
so soon and so entirely. And was Clara to be accepted by his
people, who had been so hostile to herself?
‘I may call in as I go to chapel,’ she said. ‘It is a long time
since I saw Clara.’
‘Very well,’ he said, astonished, and unconsciously an-
gry.
On the Sunday afternoon he went to Keston to meet
Clara at the station. As he stood on the platform he was try-
ing to examine in himself if he had a premonition.
‘Do I FEEL as if she’d come?’ he said to himself, and he
tried to find out. His heart felt queer and contracted. That
seemed like foreboding. Then he HAD a foreboding she
would not come! Then she would not come, and instead
of taking her over the fields home, as he had imagined, he
would have to go alone. The train was late; the afternoon
would be wasted, and the evening. He hated her for not
coming. Why had she promised, then, if she could not keep
her promise? Perhaps she had missed her train—he himself
was always missing trains—but that was no reason why she
should miss this particular one. He was angry with her; he
was furious.
Suddenly he saw the train crawling, sneaking round