"Yes ... he has frightened me all these years. At
first I used to think that he didn't mean it. I was a bright, merry sort of
a girl then--careless and knowing nothing about the world. And then I began
to see--that he liked it--that it gave him pleasure to have something there
that he could hurt. And then I began to be frightened. It was very lonely
here for a girl who had had a gay time, and he usen't to like my going to
Truro--and at last he even stopped my seeing people in Treliss. And then I
began to be really frightened--and used to wake in the night and see him
standing by the door watching me. Then I thought that when you were born
that would draw us together, but it didn't, and I was always ill after
that. He would do things--Oh!" her hand pressed her mouth. "Peter, dear,
you mustn't think about it, only when I am dead I don't want you to think
that I was quite a fool--if they tell you so. I don't want you to think
it was all his fault either because it wasn't--I was silly and didn't
understand sometimes ... but it's killed me, that dreadful waiting for
him to do something, I never knew what it would be, and sometimes it
was nothing ... but I knew that he liked to hurt ... and it was the
expectation."
In that white room, now flaming with the fires of the setting sun, Peter
caught his mother to his breast and held her there and her white hands
clutched his knees.
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