H.E. Bates Companion

A tale involving a widower in his fifties and a reserved woman his age, both of them guests at a seaside hotel, and the young daughter of the hotel owner. His flirtation with the girl troubles the older woman, who looks "at him with the oddest conflict of emotions: hatred and doubt and despair and what he felt was also a kind of religious devotion." In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Twenty Tales (1951), Love in a Wych Elm and Other Stories (2009). Reprinted in The Editor Regrets (1937).