>“Good-bye! So glad to have seen you! What, dear Mrs. Ponsonby, are you going to run away too? So kind of you to come out on such an afternoon! Good-bye!”

It was a Friday afternoon, and Friday was Mrs. Romayne’s “day.” This particular Friday had been about as unpleasant, atmospherically, as it is possible for even a November day to be, short of actual dense fog; it had been very dark, and a drizzling rain—a dirty rain too—had fallen unceasingly. Under these circumstances it was rather surprising that any one should have ventured out, even in the most luxurious brougham, than that Mrs. Romayne’s visitors should have been comparatively few in number.

The departure of the ladies to whom her farewells had been spoken, and with whom she had been exchanging social commonplaces for the last quarter of an hour, left her alone; and as she returned to her chair by the dainty tea-table and poured herself out a cup of tea, she had apparently very little expectation of further callers, though it was only just past five o’clock; for when the door-bell rang a few minutes later she paused, and a look of surprise crossed her face. She put down her cup with a little sigh, which was more a concession made to the dictum of conventionality that callers are a bore than an expression of real feeling; and then, as the door opened, she rose with a touch of genuine satisfaction.

“My dear Mrs. Pomeroy!” she exclaimed. “How sweet of you to come out on such a shocking day! Really, you must have had an intuition of my forlorn condition, I think! Maud, dear, how are you?”

She had given her left hand to the girl in a familiar, caressing way as she retained Mrs. Pomeroy’s right hand, and now she drew the elder lady with charming insistence towards a large, inviting-looking chair, indicating to the daughter with a pretty gesture that she was to take a low seat near the table.

“It is an ill wind that blows no one any good!” she continued gaily, as Mrs. Pomeroy greeted her placidly. “It is really too delightful to get you all to myself like this! How seldom one gets the chance of a cosy chat! And how very seldom it comes with the people of all others with whom one would thoroughly enjoy it! You’ll have some tea, won’t you—oh, yes, you really must; it is so much more friendly!” She laughed as she spoke, and turned to the girl sitting demurely on the low seat near her with a tacit claim on her sympathy and comprehension which was very fascinating. Miss Pomeroy’s pretty, expressionless lips smiled sweetly, and her mother, who was always ready to yield to pressure where a cup of tea was concerned—that soothing beverage being forbidden her by her medical authorities—answered contentedly:

“Well, thanks, yes! I think I will! One really wants a cup of tea on a day like this, doesn’t one?” Mrs. Pomeroy had rarely been known to leave a statement unqualified by a question. “It is really very disagreeable weather, isn’t it? Not that it seems to trouble you at all.” Mrs. Pomeroy smiled one of her slow, amiable smiles as she spoke. “I am so glad to see you looking so much better!”

Mrs. Romayne laughed.

“I am very well indeed, thanks,” she said. “But I’ve not been ill that I know of, dear Mrs. Pomeroy.”

Mrs. Pomeroy shook her head gently.

“I thought, do you know, when I first came home, that you looked as though your holiday had been a little too much for you—so many people’s holiday is a little too much for them, don’t you think? And how is your boy? Very hard at work, we hear.”

Mrs. Romayne smiled.

Mrs. Pomeroy’s opinion as to her looks had been quite correct; and it was only within the last fortnight that they had altered for the better. Within that fortnight her brightness and vivacity had ceased to be—as they had been for weeks before—wholly artificial; something of the look of nervous strain had gone out of her eyes, and her face was altogether less sharpened. Her smile now was genuine; and her voice was strangely tender and contented.

“Very hard,” she said. “I have had to get used to a great deal of absence on his part. He has gone down to Brighton to-day, until Monday; he needs a little fresh air, of course. It is so long since he has been shut up as he is now.”

“You must miss him very much,” said Mrs. Pomeroy placidly.

Mrs. Romayne did not answer directly, except with a laugh.

“I am almost inclined to envy mothers with daughters,” she said, smiling at Miss Pomeroy again. “I wonder, now”—a sudden idea had apparently struck Mrs. Romayne—“I wonder whether you would lend me your daughter now and then, and I wonder whether she would consent to be lent.”

“I should be delighted,” said Mrs. Pomeroy, with vague amiability, and an equally vague glance at her daughter. “And I’m sure Maud will be delighted, too, won’t you, Maud?”

“Delighted!” assented Maud, with pretty promptitude.

“Well, then, we must arrange it some time or other,” declared Mrs. Romayne gaily. “Perhaps you would come and spend a week with me, Maud—that would be charming!”

But she did not press the point, letting the subject drop with apparent carelessness, and talking about other things, always keeping the girl in the conversation; turning to her now and then with a pleasant, familiar word, or a gesture which was lightly affectionate. The mother and daughter had risen to take leave when she said carelessly:

“Oh, by-the-bye, Maud, dear, have you anything to do to-morrow afternoon? I’ve been bothered into taking two tickets for a matinÉe, a charity affair, you know, but they say it will be rather good. It would be so nice of you to come with me!”

“It will be very nice of you to take me!” was the response. “Thank you very much!”

A minute or two more passed in the arrangement of the place and hour for meeting, and then Mrs. Pomeroy drifted blandly out of the room, followed by her daughter, and Mrs. Romayne was again alone.

She walked to the fireplace this time, and putting one foot on the fender, stood looking down, her face intent and satisfied.

“Just the right sort of girl!” she said to herself. “Just the right sort of girl!”

She was wearing the little gold bangle which Julian had given her on her birthday—the one which Miss Pomeroy had helped him to choose—and she was turning it on her wrist with tender, contemplative touches. She was so absorbed in her reflection that she did not hear the servant come into the room, or notice for the moment that the girl was standing beside her with a letter. She started at last, and looked up; took the letter, and opened it carelessly, without looking at it, as the woman took away the tea-table.

Mrs. Romayne’s face had changed slightly as she began to read—changed and hardened—and as she finished she drew the letter through her fingers with a gesture of mere impatience, which was somehow belied by the look in her eyes. Something of that strained look had come back into them. She could not see him to-morrow, she was saying to herself briefly; she was not going to put off Maud Pomeroy; Dennis Falconer must fix another time, and she would write him a line at once. She walked quickly across to her writing table, sat down, drew out a sheet of paper and took up a pen.

And then she paused.

Ten minutes later her note was written, and on its way to the post, but it was not directed to Dennis Falconer. It began, “My dear Maud,” and it told Miss Pomeroy that business had “turned up” which would make it impossible for Mrs. Romayne to go to the theatre on the following afternoon, and that she enclosed the tickets hoping that Maud might be able to use them.

Exactly on the stroke of three on the following afternoon the door-bell rang. Mrs. Romayne was alone in the drawing-room, apparently lazily and pleasantly enough occupied with the latest number of the latest society paper; and as the sound reached her ear her lips hardened into a thin, straight line, and her eyes flashed for a moment with a look of antagonism which was almost defiant. Then the servant announced:

“Mr. Falconer!”

Dennis Falconer was looking very pale; there was little colour even in his lips, and his face was set and stern. He took the hand Mrs. Romayne held out to him, and replied to her greeting in the briefest possible phrase, with no softening of a something curiously solemn and inexorable about his demeanour, though his eyes rested on her for an instant with a singular expression. He disliked and despised the woman before him, and yet at that moment he pitied her.

“Sit down!” she said. “I am charmed to see you, though, do you know, you have chosen an inopportune moment. I had a very pleasant engagement for this afternoon, and I nearly put you off. So I hope the business is really very grave.”

Her voice was lightness itself, and that very lightness, with the almost unusual loquacity with which she had received him, seemed to witness to the presence in her mind of a recollection which she was determined to ignore—the recollection of their last interview, in that very room. There was an air about her of having entrenched herself behind a barrier which she defied him to pass; of being resolute this time against surprise, or against any other method of attack.

“It is very grave!” said Falconer, and in contrast with her voice, his rang with stern heaviness. “I must ask you to prepare yourself for bad news!”

“Bad news!” she echoed sharply, as her eyes, fixed on his face, grew suddenly bright and keen. “Oh—money, I suppose?” Her voice jarred a little, though she spoke very lightly.

“No!” said Falconer.

His tone was absolutely uncompromising. On his unsympathetic and unimaginative mind the effect of her manner was to obliterate his sense of pity beneath a consciousness of the retributive justice of the moment before her.

“Not money?” she said, with a little, unreal laugh. “Well, that’s a comfort, at any rate.” Her hand had clenched itself suddenly round the arm of her chair on his monosyllable, and now she paused a moment, almost as though her breath had failed her, before she said, with affected carelessness: “And if not—what?”

Her back was towards the light, and Falconer could not see her face.

“I will answer your question, if you will allow me, with another,” he said. “Have you noticed anything unusual in the course of the past month—or more—in the conduct of your son?”

In the instant’s dead silence that followed a slight creaking sound made itself audible and then died away. The clenched hand on the bar of Mrs. Romayne’s chair had passed slowly round it with such intense pressure as to produce the sound. Then she answered him, as he had previously answered her, in a monosyllable.

“No!” she said. There was a desperate effort in her voice at carelessness, at nonchalance, at astonishment; but it was penetrated through and through with all her past antagonism towards, and defiance of, the man before her accentuated into fierce repudiation. Falconer’s voice, as he answered her, seemed to confront that defiance with inexorable fate.

“That is almost unfortunate,” he said sternly. “In that case, I fear that what I have to tell you must fall with double and treble severity, as coming upon you unawares. Will you not think again? Has he not been absent from home a good deal? Have his absences been satisfactorily accounted for? Have you ever proved”—he paused, laying stress upon the last word—“have you ever proved such accounts, as given by himself, correct?”

With a valiant effort, the power of which Falconer must have appreciated had he been able to penetrate beyond the ghastly artificiality of the result, Mrs. Romayne rallied her forces, and strove to throw his words back upon him; to defend and entrench herself once and for all with the only weapon she knew. She broke into a thin, tuneless laugh.

“What an absolutely gruesome catechism!” she cried. “Really, it would take me weeks of solitary confinement and meditation among the tombs—isn’t there a book about that, by-the-bye?—before I could approach it in a duly sepulchral spirit. Do you know, it would be an absolute relief to me if you could come to the point? I am taking it for granted, you see, that there is a point, which is no doubt a compliment which its infinitesimal nature hardly deserves. Produce the poor little thing, for heaven’s sake!”

“The point is this,” said Falconer grimly and concisely. “Your son’s life, as you know it, is a lie. He has a sordid version of what is known as an ‘establishment.’ He is living with a work-girl in Camden Town.”

There was a choked, strangled sound, and Mrs. Romayne’s figure seemed to shrink together as though every muscle had contracted in one simultaneous throb. Her face, could Falconer have seen it, was rigid and blank, except for her eyes. For that first instant she looked as a patient might look who, having suspected himself of a deadly disease, having congratulated himself on the subsidence of his symptoms and known hope, learns from his physician that that subsidence of obvious symptoms was in itself only a more dangerous symptom still, and that he is indeed doomed. Her eyes were the eyes of a woman who looks despair full in the face.

But with no human being who keeps hold of life and reason can the vivid agony of such a vision endure for more than an instant. It dulls by reason of its very insupportableness. Time is an empty word where mental suffering is concerned, and the second-hand of the tall clock in the corner had traversed its dial only once before a kind of film passed over those agonised eyes, and Mrs. Romayne spoke in a thin, hoarse voice. And the man so close to her was conscious of nothing but a short pause, and was revolted accordingly.

“How do you know?” Even in that moment the instinct of defiance of him personally could not wholly yield, and lingered in her voice.

“I have an old servant who lives in Camden Town. He is an invalid, and I occasionally visit him. His wife is a garrulous woman, and thinking that I have some claim on her gratitude, considers it necessary to inform me as to all her own and her neighbours’ affairs. Visiting the husband last Friday week, I found the wife greatly excited and alarmed for the reputation of the street—in which she lets lodgings—by the appearance in the house opposite of a couple whose relations to one another had instantly been suspected by their landlady and her neighbours, though they passed as newly-made man and wife!”

With a sudden, low cry of inexpressible horror and dismay Mrs. Romayne sprang to her feet, flinging out her hands as though to keep off something intolerable to be borne.

“No! no!” she cried breathlessly. “No! no! Not that! Not married? It would be ruin! Ruin! ruin! No! no!”

Dennis Falconer paused, freezing slowly into what seemed to him surely justifiable abhorrence of the woman before him. What if he knew in his heart that such a marriage would indeed mean ruin to a young man? So bald a trampling down of the moral aspect of the position before the practical was not decent! It was for a woman—and that woman the young man’s mother—to be overwhelmed by the moral horror to the exclusion of every other thought! And it was the practical alone that had drawn any show of emotion from Mrs. Romayne!

“I am sorry to have agitated you!” he said, and his voice was cold and cutting as steel. “I have no doubt in my own mind that they are not married. I had better perhaps continue to give you the facts in order. Chance led to my seeing the young man in question as he was leaving the house. I recognised your son. I proceeded to make enquiries. He passes as a medical student, under the name of Roden. The girl is—or was—a hand at one of the big millinery establishments. From her affectation of innocence and simplicity, the woman who has most opportunity of observing her is inclined to think the very worst of her!”

A quick, hissing breath—an unmistakeable breath of relief—parted Mrs. Romayne’s white lips. She had sunk down again in her chair and was grasping it now with both hands as she leant a little forward, trembling in every limb.

“Then it is not likely—it is not likely that he has married her,” she said, in a low, rapid tone to herself rather than to Falconer, as it seemed. “Go on!”

“There is very little more to be said,” returned Falconer icily. “They have occupied the rooms—that is to say, the girl has occupied them, visited every day by your son—for three weeks now. The woman has discovered that they had been somewhere in the country together for a week previously. You will, of course, be able to recall his absence from home. Yesterday he took her away into the country again; they are to return on Monday!”

He stopped; and as though she were no longer conscious of his presence, Mrs. Romayne’s head was bowed slowly lower, as if under some irresistible weight, until her forehead rested on her hand, stretched out still upon the arm of her wide chair.

She lifted her face at last, white and haggard as twenty added years of life should not have made it, and rose, helping herself feebly with the arm of her chair, like a woman whose physical strength is broken. Falconer rose also. He was utterly alienated from her; he was conscious of only the most distant pity, but he felt that it was incumbent on him to say something.

“I regret very much that it should have fallen to my lot to break this to you!” he said, stiffly and awkwardly. “I fear that coming from me——” He hesitated and paused.

From out the past, confusing, almost numbing him, a vague and ghastly influence had risen suddenly upon him to strain that strange, intangible, and awful cord of common knowledge by which he and the woman before him were bound together, revolt against it or deny its presence as they might. Under the touch of that influence his last words had come from him almost involuntarily. He had not known whither they tended; he could bring them to no conclusion.

Mrs. Romayne looked him in the eyes, holding now to a table by which she stood, but with no weakness in her ashen face. She seemed to be concentrating all her force into one final repudiation of him. She ignored his words as though he had not spoken.

“I will ask you to leave me now!” she said. And her voice, thin and toneless though it was, left her completely mistress of the situation.

She made no movement to shake hands; he hesitated a moment, then bowed and left the room.