Adjusting the outer edge of the pattern he stopped to select a shell from a heap at his feet.Pierce became aware of his mother and turned slowly to face her. He rarely moved fast. He looked at her without smiling, almost grimly. He looked at her like an animal, cornered but not frightened, a dangerous confident animal. And Mary apprehended herself as a thin dark woman, a mother, a representative somehow of the past, of Pierce's past, confronting him as if she were already a ghost. This came to her in an instant with an agony of possessive love for her son and a blinding pity of which she did not know whether it was for him or for herself. Next moment, as she searched for something to say, she took in the scene, Barbara's pretty room, so tidy and empty now, but already expectant. And with an immediate instinct of her son's vulnerability she saw the huge shell design as utterly untimely. It was something that belonged to the quietness of Pierce's thought about Barbara and not to the hurly-burly of Barbara's actual arrival, which Mary now anticipated with a kind of dread. The careful work with the shells seemed to her suddenly so typical of Pierce, so slow and inward and entirely without judgement.There was a shout from the lawn outside and then the sound of a car upon the gravel and the ecstatic barking of Mingo.Pierce did not move instantly. He held his mother's anguished look for a moment longer and then as she moved back he went unhurriedly past her and along the landing.'Mama, it was so marvellous, I had
