He liked games, and food, and adventure--he liked quite tolerably his family--he liked immensely the prospect of going to school.
There were other things--strange, uncertain things--that lay like the dim, uncertain pattern of some tapestry in the back of his mind.

He gave _them_, as the months passed, less and less heed.

Only sometimes when he was asleep....
Meanwhile, his mother, with the heroism worthy of Boadicea, that great and savage warrior, kept his impulses of devotion, of sacrifice, of adoration, in her heart.

John had no need of them; very long ago, Reginald Scarlett, then no K.C., with all the K.C.manner, had told her that _he_ did not need them either.

She gave her dinner parties, her receptions, her political gatherings--tremulous and smiling she faced a world that thought her a wise, capable little woman, who would see her husband a judge and peer one of these days.
"Mrs.Scarlett--a woman of great social ambition," was their definition of her.
"Mrs.Scarlett--the mother of John," was her own.
II On a certain night, early in the month of September, young John dreamt again--but for the first time for many months--the dream that had, in the old days, come to him so often.