All the rooms in the house in Chelsea were bright and pretty, and by no means the least attractive was the dining-room. The late breakfast-hour fixed by Mrs. Romayne, “just for the season,” as she said, gave plenty of time for the sun to find its way in at the windows; and on the morning following Julian’s dinner with Lord Garstin the sunshine was dancing on the walls, and the soft, warm air floating in at the open windows, as though the thunderstorm of the previous evening had cleared the air to some purpose.

The two occupants of the room, as they faced one another across the dainty little breakfast-table, had been laughing and talking after their usual fashion ever since they sat down; talking of the party of the night before and of engagements in the future; and finally reverting to Lord Garstin’s dinner and Marston Loring, of whom Julian had already had a great deal to say.

“I have a kind of feeling that he and I are going to be chums, mother!” he said as he carried his coffee-cup round the table to her to be refilled. “I think he took to me rather, do you know!”

“That’s a very surprising thing, isn’t it?” returned his mother, laughing. “And you took to him? Well, if you must pick up a chum, you couldn’t do it under better auspices than Lord Garstin’s.”

“I took to him no end!” answered Julian eagerly. “I do hope you’ll like him.”

“I think I am pretty sure to like him,” said Mrs. Romayne graciously. “I remember hearing about him some time ago—that he was quite one of the rising young men of the day. He was to have been introduced to me then. I forget why it didn’t come off. There’s your coffee!”

Julian took his cup with a word of thanks and turned back to his chair; and his mother began again.

“Mr. Loring is a member of the Prince’s, I suppose?” she said. The “Prince’s” was the name of the club at which Lord Garstin’s dinner had been given. “I suppose you will want to be setting up a club in no time, sir?”

Julian laughed, and then replied somewhat eagerly and confidentially, as though in unconscious response to a certain invitation in his mother’s tone.

“Well, of course a fellow does want a club, mother,” he said. “One feels it more and more, don’t you know! Of course I should awfully like to belong to the Prince’s.”

“And why not?” responded his mother brightly, watching him rather narrowly as she spoke. “Lord Garstin would put you up, I’ve no doubt, if I asked him.”

Julian’s eyes sparkled.

“It would be first-rate!” he exclaimed. “Mother, it’s awfully jolly of you!” He paused a moment and then continued tentatively: “It would be rather expensive, you know. That’s the only thing!”

“So I suppose!” answered his mother, laughing. “Oh, you’re a very expensive luxury altogether! However, I imagine another hundred a year would do?” Then as he broke into vehement demonstrations of delight and gratitude, she added with another laugh which did not seem to ring quite true: “I don’t think you need ever run short of money!”

There was a moment’s pause as Julian, the picture of glowing satisfaction, finished his breakfast, and then Mrs. Romayne rose.

“What are you going to do this morning?” she said. “Read?”

Julian glanced out of the window.

“Well,” he said, “it’s an awfully jolly morning, isn’t it? I promised to see after some live-stock for Miss Pomeroy’s stall—puppies, and kittens, and canary birds. Rum idea, isn’t it? What are you doing this morning, dear?”

It turned out that Mrs. Romayne had nothing particular on her hands beyond a visit to a jeweller in Bond Street, and accepting very easily his substitution of Miss Pomeroy’s commission for the legal studies to which he was supposed to devote himself in the mornings, she took up his reference to the weather, and suggested that they should drive together to execute first his business and then her own.

“It will be rather nice driving this morning,” she said. “And we can take a turn in the Park.”

Certainly there was a certain amount of excuse for those people who had already begun to say that Mrs. Romayne was never happy without her son by her side.

She spared no pains, however, to make him happy with her; and as they drove along there was probably no brighter or brisker talk than theirs in progress in all London. They drove through the West End streets and penetrated, in search of Miss Pomeroy’s requirements, into regions into which Mrs. Romayne had hardly ever penetrated before; regions which rather amused her to-day in their squalor. When Julian had done his commission in plenty of time to undo it and do it again before the bazaar came off, as he remarked with a laugh, they turned back again and went to Bond Street.

“I have a little private matter to attend to here,” said Julian, as he followed his mother into the jeweller’s shop. “You just have the kindness to stop at your end of the shop, will you, please, and leave me to mine?”

Mrs. Romayne laughed and shook her head at him. It was within a few days of her birthday, which was always demonstratively honoured by her son.

“Now, you are not to be extravagant,” she said, holding up a slender, threatening finger with mock severity. “Mind, I will not have it. I shall descend upon you unawares, and keep you in order.”

She let him leave her with another laugh, and he disappeared to the other end of the shop, while she followed a shopman to a counter near the door. Just turning away from it, she met Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter.

“Now, this is really most delightful!” exclaimed Mrs. Pomeroy, if any speech so comfortable and so entirely unexcited may be described as an exclamation. “It is always charming to see you, dear Mrs. Romayne, of course; but it really is particularly charming this morning, isn’t it, Maud?”

“That’s very nice,” said Mrs. Romayne brightly, turning to Maud Pomeroy with a smile, and pressing the girl’s hand with an affectionate familiarity developed in her with regard to Miss Pomeroy by the last few weeks. A hardly perceptible touch of additional satisfaction had come to her face as she saw the mother and daughter. “Please tell me why?”

“Yes, of course,” said Mrs. Pomeroy placidly; she sat down as she spoke with that instinct for personal ease under all circumstances, which was her ruling characteristic. “That is just what I want to do. My dear Mrs. Romayne, it is the bazaar, of course. It really is a most awkward thing, isn’t it, Maud? It seems that we have asked twenty-one ladies—all most important—to become stall-holders, and we can’t possibly make room for more than eighteen stalls! Now, what would you—— Ah, Mr. Romayne, how do you do?”

Mrs. Pomeroy had broken off her tale of woe as placidly as she had begun it, and had greeted Julian with comfortable cordiality. He had come up hastily, not becoming aware of his mother’s companions until he was close to them.

“This is awfully lucky for me!” he exclaimed. “I want a lady desperately for half a minute, and my mother won’t do. Miss Pomeroy,” turning eagerly to the demure, correct-looking figure standing by Mrs. Pomeroy’s side, “will you come to the other end of the shop with me for half a minute? It would be awfully good of you.”

The words were spoken in a tone of fashionable good-fellowship—the pseudo good-fellowship which passes for the real thing in society—which, as addressed by Julian Romayne to Miss Pomeroy and her mother, was one of the results of his work in connection with the bazaar; and before Miss Pomeroy could answer, Mrs. Romayne interposed. Somebody very frequently did interpose when Miss Pomeroy was addressed. No one ever seemed to expect opinions or decisions from her; perhaps because she was her mother’s daughter; perhaps because of her curiously characterless exterior; while the fact that she had never been known to controvert a statement—in words—doubtless accentuated the tendency of her acquaintance to make statements for her.

“It will be awfully good of you,” Mrs. Romayne said to her now, laughing, “if you are kind enough to help this silly fellow, to insist on his remembering that his mother will be very angry indeed if he is extravagant. I shall have to give up having a birthday, I think.”

Then as Julian, with a gay gesture of repression to his mother, waited for Miss Pomeroy’s answer with another pleading, “It would be ever so good of you,” the girl, with a glance at her mother, said, with a conventional smile, “With pleasure,” and walked away by his side.

Mrs. Pomeroy looked after Julian with an approving smile. He was a favourite of hers.

“Such a nice fellow,” she murmured amiably; and Mrs. Romayne laughed her pretty, self-conscious laugh.

“So glad you find him so,” she said. “Oh, by-the-bye, dear Mrs. Pomeroy, can you tell me anything about a Mr. Marston Loring? He goes everywhere, doesn’t he? I think I have seen him at your house.”

“Oh, yes,” returned Mrs. Pomeroy, as placidly as ever, but with a decision which indicated that she was giving expression to a popular verdict, not merely to an opinion of her own. “He is quite a young man to know. Very clever, and rising. I don’t know what his people were; he has been so successful that it really doesn’t signify, you know. He lives in chambers—I don’t remember where, but it is a very good address.”

“Has he money?” asked Mrs. Romayne.

“I really don’t know,” said Mrs. Pomeroy. “He is doing extremely well at the bar. By the way, they say,” and herewith Mrs. Pomeroy lowered her voice and confided to her interlocutor two or three details in connection with Marston Loring’s private life—the life which in the world no one is supposed to recognise—which might have been considered by no means to his credit. They were not details which affected his society character in any way, however, and Mrs. Romayne only laughed with such slight affectation of reprobation as a woman of the world should show.

“Men are all alike, I suppose,” she said, with that fashionable indulgence which has probably done as much as anything else towards making men “all alike.” “By-the-bye, he was Lord Dunstan’s best man, wasn’t he?”

Mrs. Pomeroy was just confirming to Mr. Marston Loring what was evidently a certificate of social merit, when Julian and Miss Pomeroy reappeared, and Mrs. Romayne, with an exclamation at herself as a “frightful gossip,” turned to the shopman, who had been waiting her pleasure at a discreet distance, and transacted her business.

“We haven’t settled anything about this trying business of the twenty-one stall-holders,” said Mrs. Pomeroy plaintively, as she finished. “Now, I wonder—we were thinking of taking a turn in the Park, weren’t we, Maud?” Mrs. Pomeroy had a curious little habit of constantly referring to her daughter. “It would be so kind of you, dear Mrs. Romayne, if you would send your carriage home and take a turn with us, you and Mr. Romayne, and I would take you home, of course. I really am anxious to know what you advise, for there seems to be an idea that I am in some way responsible for the awkwardness. So absurd, you know. I am quite sure I have only done as I was told.”

Apparently it had not occurred to Mrs. Pomeroy that to do as you are told by four or five different people with totally different ends in view is apt to lead to confusion.

Mrs. Romayne fell in with the plan proposed, after an instant’s demur, with smiling alacrity, and the “turn in the Park” that followed was a very gay one. Miss Pomeroy and Julian laughed and talked together—that is to say, Julian laughed and talked in the best of good spirits, and Miss Pomeroy put in just the correct words and pretty smiles which were wanted to keep his conversation in full swing. Mrs. Romayne and Mrs. Pomeroy, facing them, disposed of the difficulty in connection with the bazaar, after a good deal of irrelevant discussion, by saying very often, and in a great many words, that three more stalls must be got in somewhere; a decision which seemed to Mrs. Pomeroy to make everything perfectly right, although she had had it elaborately demonstrated to her that such a course was absolutely impossible.

It was half-past one when Mrs. Romayne and Julian were put down at their own door, and the barouche drove off amid a chorus of light laughter and last words. The sunshine, the fresh air, the movement, or something less simple and less physical, seemed to have had a most exhilarating effect on Mrs. Romayne. Her face was almost as radiant in its curiously different fashion as Julian’s was radiant with the unreasoning good spirits of youth.

“Such nice people!” she said lightly. “I wonder whether lunch is ready? I’m quite starving! Oh, letters!” taking up three or four which lay on the hall-table. “Let us trust they are interesting!” She turned into the dining-room as she spoke, sorting the envelopes in her hand. “One for you—your friend Von MÜhler, isn’t it?” she said, tossing it to Julian carelessly. “One for me—an invitation obviously. One from Mrs. Ponsonby, about her stall, I suppose. And one from——”

She stopped suddenly. The last letter of the pile was contained in a small square envelope, and addressed in what was obviously a man’s handwriting—a good handwriting, clear and strong, but somewhat cramped and precise. “Mrs. William Romayne, 22, Queen Anne Street, Chelsea.” A curious stillness seemed to come over the little alert figure as the pale blue eyes caught sight of the writing, and then Mrs. Romayne moved and walked slowly away to the window, still with her eyes fixed on the envelope. She paused a moment, and then she opened it and drew out a sheet of note-paper bearing a few lines only in the same small, clear hand.

“Well, mother, and what have your correspondents got to say? I have had no end of a screed from Von MÜhler.”

Nearly ten minutes had passed, and Mrs. Romayne started violently. She thrust the letter—still open in her hand, though she was looking fixedly out of the window—back into its envelope and turned. Her face had altered curiously and completely. All its colour, all the genuine animation which had pervaded it as she came into the room, had disappeared; it was pale and hard-looking, and the lines about the mouth and eyes were very visible.

“A dinner invitation from Lady Ashton,” she said, “and a long rigmarole from Mrs. Ponsonby to tell me that she is resigning her stall, and why she is doing it. Poor Mrs. Pomeroy should be grateful to her!”

Her tone was an exaggeration of her bright carelessness of ten minutes before, forced and unnatural; her back was towards the window, or even Julian’s boyish eyes might have noticed the stiff unreality of the smile with which she spoke.

They sat down to lunch together, but the strange change which had come to her did not pass away. Julian did most of the talking, though the readiness of her comments and her smiles—which left her lips always hard and set, and never seemed to touch her eyes—prevented his being in the least aware of the fact. Their afternoon was spent apart; but when they met again there was that about her face which made Julian say with some surprise:

“Are you tired, mother?”

They were going to a large dinner-party before the very smart “at home” to which Julian and Mr. Loring had referred on the previous evening as an opportunity for meeting, and Mrs. Romayne was magnificently dressed. There were diamonds round her throat and in her hair, and as they flashed and sparkled, seeming to lend glow and animation to her face as she laughed at him for a ridiculous boy, Julian thought carelessly that he must have imagined the drawn look which had struck him—though he had only recognised it as “tired-looking”—on his mother’s face. As though his words had startled or even annoyed her, she gave neither Julian nor any one else any further excuse for taxing her with fatigue. Throughout the long and rather dull dinner she was vivacity itself; her face always smiling, her laugh always ready. As the evening went on a flush made its appearance on her cheeks, as though the mental stimulus under which that gaiety was produced involved a veritable quickening of the pulses; and her son, when he met her in the hall after she had uncloaked for their second party, thought that he had never seen his mother look “jollier,” as he expressed it.

“We must look out for Loring,” he said eagerly. “Oh, there he is, mother, just inside the doorway! That clever-looking fellow, do you see, with a yellow buttonhole?”

It was easier to recognise an acquaintance than to approach within speaking distance of him; and some time elapsed, during which Mrs. Romayne and Julian exchanged greetings on all sides, and were received by Lady Bracondale, before they found themselves also just inside the doorway. Mrs. Romayne had given one quick, keen glance in the direction indicated by Julian, and then had become apparently oblivious of Mr. Marston Loring’s existence until Julian finally exclaimed:

“Well met, Loring! Awfully pleased to see you! Mother, may I introduce Mr. Marston Loring?”

She turned her head then, and bent it very graciously, holding out her hand with her most charming smile.

“I have known you by sight for a long time, Mr. Loring!” she said. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance!”

“The delight is mine!” was the response, spoken with just that touch of well-bred deference which is never so attractive to a woman as when it is exhibited in conjunction with such a personality as Loring’s. “It is one for which I have wished for a long time!”

“Seen the papers to-night?” interposed Julian eagerly. “We’ve lost Nottingham, you see!”

He was alluding to a bye-election which had led to the political discussion of the evening before, and Loring nodded.

“I see,” said Loring. “Romayne has told you, no doubt,” he went on, turning to Mrs. Romayne, “that we foregathered to a considerable extent last night over politics—and other things.” The last words were spoken with a glance at the younger man which seemed to ascribe to their acquaintance an altogether more personal and friendly footing than political discussion alone could have afforded it, and Mrs. Romayne laughed very graciously.

“Yes; he has told me!” she said. “I am rather thinking of getting a little jealous of you, Mr. Loring.”

A few minutes’ more talk followed—talk in which Loring bore himself with his usual cynical manner, just tempered into even unusual effectiveness—and then Mrs. Romayne prepared to move on.

“You must come and see us,” she said to Loring. “Julian will give you the address. I am at home on Fridays; and I hope you will dine with us before long!”

She gave him a pretty nod and an “au revoir,” and turned away.

“He’s awfully jolly, isn’t he, mother?” exclaimed Julian, as soon as they were out of earshot.

“Very good style,” returned Mrs. Romayne approvingly. “He is just the kind of man to get on. You have a good deal of discrimination, sir,” she added.

The mother and son were separated after that, and about half an hour later Mrs. Romayne caught sight of Julian disappearing with a very pretty girl, whose face she did not know, in the direction of the supper-room, just as she herself was greeted by Lord Garstin and pressed to repair thither.

“Thanks, no,” she said lightly. “There is such a crowd, and I really don’t want anything.”

She paused. That accentuated vivacity was still about her, as she looked up at Lord Garstin with a little smile and a gesture which he thought unusually charming.

“I want a little chat with you, though, very much,” she said with pretty confidence. “I’m going to ask you to give me some advice, do you know. Will it bore you frightfully?”

“On the contrary, it will delight me,” was the ready and by no means insincere response.

Mrs. Romayne made a gracious and grateful movement of her head.

“I would rather take your opinion than that of any other man I know,” she said confidentially. She stopped and laughed slightly. “It’s about my boy, of course!” she said. “I want to know what you think of a club for a young man in his position? Do you think, now, that it is a good thing?”

“Emphatically, yes,” returned Lord Garstin. “I consider a good club of the first importance to a young man. Your young man ought to be a member of the Prince’s.” He paused a moment, looking at her as she nodded her head softly, waiting as though for further words of wisdom from him, and thought what a delightful little woman she was. “Suppose I talk to him about it?” he said pleasantly. “I will see to it with pleasure if you would like it.”

Nothing, certainly, could have been more delightful than Mrs. Romayne’s manner, as she spoke just the right words of graceful acknowledgement and acceptance. Then she made a gaily disparaging comment on club life, and Lord Garstin’s advocacy of it, and a few minutes’ bantering, laughing repartee followed—that society repartee of which Mrs. Romayne was a mistress. From thence she drifted into talk about the party, and a complaint of the heat of the room.

“It is time we were going, I think!” she remarked, with a gay little laugh. “But a mother is a miserable slave, you see! I am ‘left until called for,’ I suppose!”

“If I were not absolutely obliged to go myself,” returned Lord Garstin, “I shouldn’t encourage such a suggestion on your part. But as that is the case, unfortunately, shall I find your boy first and send him to you?”

Mrs. Romayne shook her head with another laugh.

“I saw him retire to the supper-room a little while ago with a very pretty girl,” she said. “I make it a point never to hurry him under such circumstances! But if you should meet him you might tell him that I am quite ready when he is. Good night!”

The room was not by any means crowded now; it was getting late and a great many people were in the supper-room. The corner of the room in which Mrs. Romayne was standing happened to be nearly deserted; there was no one near her, and after Lord Garstin left her, she stood still, fanning herself and looking straight before her with her bright smile and animated expression rather stereotyped on her face. Suddenly, as if involuntarily, she turned her head; she looked across to the other side of the room and met the eyes of a man standing against the wall, who had been looking fixedly at her ever since Lord Garstin joined her. For an instant not the slightest perceptible change of expression touched her face; only the very absoluteness of its immobility suggested that that immobility was the result of a sudden and tremendous effort of self-control; then the colour faded slowly from her cheeks and from her lips; the smile did not disappear but it gradually assumed a ghastly appearance of being carved in marble; her eyes widened slightly and became strangely fixed. The man was Dennis Falconer, and he and she were looking at one another across the gulf of eighteen years.

It was only for a moment. Then Mrs. Romayne, still quite colourless, lifted her eyebrows prettily and made a gesture of amazed recognition, and Falconer moved and came slowly towards her.

“What a surprising thing!” she exclaimed, holding out her hand. “I had no idea you were here to-night! How do you do? Welcome home!”

Her tone was perfectly easy and gracious; so ultra-easy, indeed, that it deprived her words of any personal or emotional significance whatever, and relegated their meeting-place with subtle skill to the most conventional of society grounds. The rather distinguished-looking man with the good reserved manner who stood before her accepted the position with grave readiness.

“Thank you,” he said. He spoke with distant courtesy, about which there was not even the suggestion of that matter-of-course friendliness, as of distant kinship, which had made her reception of him nearly perfect as a work of art. “It is a great pleasure to me to be in England again.”

“You have been away—let me see—two years?” said Mrs. Romayne, with the vivacious assumption of intelligent interest which the social situation demanded. “Five, is it? Really? And you have done wonderful things, I hear. Funnily enough, I have been hearing about you only to-night. I must congratulate you.”

He bent his head with a courteous gesture of thanks.

“You have had my note, I hope?” he said. “You are settled in London now, Thomson tells me.”

Thomson was the family lawyer, and he and Dennis Falconer himself were Mrs. Romayne’s trustees under old Mr. Falconer’s will.

“Oh, yes!” she answered suavely. “I had it to-day, just before lunch. So nice of you to write to me. Yes, we are settled——”

She had been fanning herself carelessly throughout the short colloquy, glancing at Falconer or about the room with every appearance of perfect ease; but now, as her eyes wandered to the other end of the room something seemed to catch her attention. She hesitated, appeared to forget what she had intended to say, tried to recover herself, and failed.

Julian had come into the room, and was just parting gaily from some one in the doorway. Dennis Falconer did not take up her unfinished sentence; he followed the direction of her eyes across the room until his own rested upon Julian, and then he started slightly and glanced down at the woman by his side.

Mrs. Romayne laughed a rather high, unnatural laugh. She faced him with her eyes very hard and bright, and her lips smiling; and through all the artificiality of her face and manner there was something lurking in those hard, bright eyes as she did it, something not to be caught or defined, which made the movement almost heroic.

“You recognise him?” she said lightly. “Ridiculously like me, isn’t he?”

At that moment Julian started across the room, evidently to come to his mother. He came on, stopping incessantly to exchange good-nights, laughing, bowing, and smiling; and, as though there were a fascination for them about his gay young figure, the man and woman standing together at the other end of the room watched him draw nearer and nearer. Words continued to come from Mrs. Romayne, a pretty, inconsequent flow of society chatter, but it no more tempered the strange gaze with which her eyes followed her son than did the unheeding silence with which Falconer received them as his grave eyes rested also on the young man. The whole thing was so incongruous; the expression of those two pair of eyes was so utterly out of harmony with their surroundings, and with the laughing, unconscious boy on whom they were fixed; that they seemed to draw him out from the brightly dressed, smiling groups through which he passed, and isolate him strangely in a weird atmosphere of his own.

“Here you are, sir!” cried his mother gaily, looking no longer at Julian as he stood close to her at last, but beyond him.

“Lord Garstin told me you were ready to go, dear,” said Julian pleasantly. “I hope I haven’t kept you?”

“There was no hurry,” she answered, smiling; her voice was a little thin and strained. “We will go now, I think, but I want to introduce you first to some one whose name you know. This is your cousin, Dennis Falconer.”