He hastened with a submissive "Yes" and then fled, cake in hand. Out in the yard his little mind struggled in vain with the problem of this change, for there was no added respect in his mother's treatment of him, such as his stepping openly into the position of owner of Cloom might have made. Neither, his child's true instinct told him, was it affection suddenly awakened in her. He cast about vainly for what it might mean. Presently he went into the washhouse, where Katie and another woman were busy; they took scant notice of him, but went on discussing the fact that Archelaus had not been home to bed all night, had not long come in, and gone upstairs, where he still was, snoring for all to hear. Ishmael was not altogether ignorant, and allusions were bandied back and forth across his head which he was at once too young and too old to hear unscathed.
Left alone, Annie went upstairs, listened a moment outside the door of her eldest-born, then went on to the tiny room over the porch that was Ishmael's. And there, on her knees by the bed, she prayed silently, her eyes rolling till a slather of white showed beneath each faded iris, her reddened fingers wringing each other so that patches of pallor sprang out on them.
Annie was in the midst of a religious crisis that had overwhelmed her like a typhoon. She was one of those women who must have an outlet for passion. It had taken merely physical form with her in the days of the old Squire, but since her elevation to the position of a widow-woman she had undergone "conversion." What she had hitherto accepted, much as her farm beasts accepted it--as a clamorous necessity--she now held to be a thing accursed. Her position was an inconsistent one, as she was quick to uphold her ill-used righteousness with her neighbours; but that did not worry Annie, whose mind, blurred and wavering, never faced anything squarely.
Lawyer Tonkin had gazed into her eyes when he said good-night, and she had felt his moist and pudgy hand squeeze hers; but she knew it was the eyes and hand of the widow-woman, the owner, but for Ishmael, of Cloom Manor, with which the lawyer had dallied. Her sense of her position was flattered and a glimpse of a yet more consequential one flashed before her, but no thrill went with it. It was in the grip of what she would have thought a very different emotion that she had gone up to her room. For Tonkin had told her of a noted revivalist who was coming through West Penwith, and already she felt the first delicious tremblings of that orgy of fear which should be hers.