Always excellently dressed, Mrs. Romayne’s appearance at that moment was brilliant; almost excessively brilliant it seemed for a small dinner-party. Her frock was of the most pronounced type of full-dress, and she wore diamonds; not many, but so disposed, as was her reddish-brown hair, as to make the greatest possible effect. But the detail which had caught her son’s experienced eye, and which had brought before him by some unaccountable law of contrast that other woman’s face, lay in the fact that to-night for the first time his mother was slightly “made up.” The colour on her cheeks, the bright effectiveness of her eyes, was the result of art. It made her look haggard, Julian decided with careless, indifferent distaste; and then he was following her into the room.

She had hardly paused to speak to him; apparently she imagined that they were late.

They were widely separated at dinner, and were not thrown together, as it happened, during the whole evening. But Mrs. Romayne’s personality was a factor in the party not to be ignored that night; she was delightful, everybody said. It was a very select little dinner, and society romps went on afterwards; romps to which Mrs. Romayne contributed her full share. And to Julian that newly acquired sense of his mother’s artificiality was accentuated as the evening passed on into something like repugnance; a repugnance which, when he was seated with her at last in the brougham and driving home, produced in him a strong disinclination to rouse himself to an assumption of vivacity, and made him occupy himself with his own thoughts so exclusively that he never noticed that his mother uttered not a single word.

“Good night, mother!” he said absently, as they stood together in the hall. He was stooping to kiss her when she stopped him with a slight, peremptory gesture.

“I want to speak to you!” she said. Her voice was tense and a little hoarse. Without another word, without so much as glancing at him, she passed him and led the way to his smoking-room; turned up the lamp with a quick, hard gesture, and then turned and faced him.

All the colour had faded from Julian’s face, and he had followed her slowly. With the first sound of her voice the conviction had come to him that he was discovered. There were certain weaknesses in him hitherto undeveloped by the circumstances of his life, but radical factors in his character. Morally speaking he was a coward. His hour had come, and he was afraid to meet it. He came just inside the door and stood leaning against the writing-table, confronting his mother, but neither looking at her nor speaking.

“Tell me where you have been since Friday!” she said, low and peremptorily; and then she stopped herself abruptly, putting out her hand as though to prevent him from speaking, as a spasm of pain distorted her face. “No!” she said in a hoarse, breathless way. “No, don’t! You’ll tell me a lie. Don’t! I know!”

She had put out her hand and was steadying herself by the high oak mantelpiece—part of her recent present to Julian—but her face was rigid and set, and her eyes, full of a strange, indefinable agony, which she seemed to be all the while holding desperately at bay, never left the pale, downcast, almost sullen face opposite her.

With a determined wrench and setting in motion of all his faculties, Julian pulled himself together so far as to take refuge in that sure resort of the deficient in moral courage—an assumption of jaunty and light-hearted non-comprehension. Perhaps he had never in his life been more like his mother than he was at that moment as he threw back his head and answered, with an affected gaiety which was somewhat hollow and unsuccessful:

“What do you know, dear? You’re coming it rather strong, aren’t you?”

“I know that you have been living with a common work-girl somewhere in Camden Town for a month or more!”

The words were spoken in the same hoarse voice which rang now, low as it was, with an intolerable disgust. But its expression seemed to affect Julian not at all. The words themselves were occupying all his perception. A quick frown of consideration appeared on his forehead, as though some relief or reprieve had come to him, bringing with it possibilities the skilful turning to account of which called into play his mental faculties, and in so doing strung up his nerve. He dropped his artificiality of manner, and seemed to brace himself to meet the emergency in which he found himself. The situation had evidently suddenly altered its character for him. He was no longer cowed by it.

There was a pause—a pause in which Mrs. Romayne’s eyes seemed to dilate and contract, and dilate again under the suffering to which she allowed expression in neither tone nor gesture; and then there came from Julian four awkward, hardly audible words, jerked out rather than spoken, with long pauses intervening:

“How do you know?”

A short, sharp breath came from Mrs. Romayne, and then she said, with cold decisiveness, though it seemed that nothing would take that hoarseness from her voice:

“It matters very little how I know. That I know by one chance; that some one else may know by another; some one else again by another—the details in each case, when the chances are innumerable, are nothing! Have you lived all this time in London not to know that discovery is inevitable—to wonder ‘how’ when it comes?”

There was a bitterness, a keenness of scorn in her voice which stung him like a lash, and he answered hotly:

“After all, mother, we are not living in Arcadia! We don’t talk about these things, and I’m awfully sorry, I’m sure, that this should have come to your knowledge; I’m awfully sorry to offend you. But, hang it all, I’m not worse than lots of fellows about!”

His tone had gathered confidence and defiance as he went on, and it seemed to shake her a little. Her hold on the mantelpiece tightened, and she spoke quickly and rather nervously.

“It’s very likely,” she said. “I don’t want to argue the principle with you. Young men have their own ideas, I know; but how many young men—drop out? How many young men, with good positions, good chances, somehow or other get into bad odour; get to be not received—or, if they are received, it is with certain reservations—through this kind of thing? Oh, of course I don’t say it’s inevitable. There are lots of men about, as you say! But it’s an awful risk. In the case of a young man like you, with no title to the position you hold in society but your—your personality, don’t you see, it is a double and treble risk. It is playing with edged tools; it is holding a knife to your own throat. You would go under so horribly easily.”

She paused abruptly, as though the image before her eyes were too terrible to her to be pursued further, and tried to moisten her dry lips, on which the touch of paint had cracked now, showing how white they were beneath. The ghastliness of the incongruity between her manner and the superficialities of which she spoke was indescribable. Julian did not speak; he was moving one foot to and fro slowly over the carpet, at which he gazed immovably, and his mother went on almost immediately:

“You must give it up, Julian,” she said incisively. “I will do anything that is necessary in the way of money; I don’t want to be hard upon you. Anything the girl wants you shall have; but you must break with her at once.”

She paused again, but still Julian did not speak; still he did not raise his eyes. She went on with a growing insistence in her voice which went hand in hand with a growing agony of appeal:

“If you don’t see the necessity now, you must believe me when I tell you that you will—you will. Look, dear! your life is surely not so dull that you need run after such distraction as that! You shall marry if you want to. You shall marry any one you like. But you must—you must give this up. Julian——” She stopped for a moment, and her voice grew thin, almost faint, as she pressed so heavily on the carving by which she held that her hand was bruised and blackened. “Julian, I am not telling you what it has been to me to know that you have deceived me. I am not going to try and make you feel—I don’t want you to feel it, dear—what it has been to me to go over your home-life of the last few weeks and know that you have lied to me at every turn—to me, who have only wanted to make you happy. I won’t reproach you. Perhaps young men think it a kind of right—a kind of right——” She repeated the sentence, unfinished as it was, as though it contained an idea to which she clung. “It is not for my sake—to spare my feelings, that I tell you you must give it up. It is for your own. Julian, my boy, you must believe me.”

Her words, quivering with entreaty, died away; her eyes, full of supplication, were fixed on his; and Julian spoke—spoke without lifting his eyes from the ground.

“Suppose I married her?” he said in a low, shamefaced voice.

“What!” The monosyllable rang out sharp and vibrating, and Mrs. Romayne, all softness or relaxation struck from her face and figure in one sudden bracing of every muscle, stood staring at him out of eyes alive with horror.

“Suppose—I married—her!”

“Supposing that—I will tell you! You would have to keep her and yourself! You would have no more of my money, and you would never be acknowledged in my house again!” Her low voice was like fine, cold steel, and she paused. Then quite suddenly, as though the horror kept at bay in her eyes had leapt up and mastered her in an instant, she flung out her hands wildly, crying: “Julian, Julian! You are not married? Tell me, tell me you are not married?”

And Julian, white to the very lips, said low and hurriedly:

“No!”

There was a long silence. With a choked, hysterical cry, Mrs. Romayne dropped into a chair near her, and covered her face with her hands. Julian drew out his pocket-handkerchief and mechanically wiped his forehead. At last he began, in a nervous, uneven voice:

“Mother, look here, I—you don’t quite understand me! I—she—it’s—it’s not the kind of girl you think!” He stopped and drew his hand desperately before his eyes. That innocent, white face, in its dingy frame, what did it want before his eyes now? How could he get on if he kept looking at it? “She—we—it was my fault! Mother, look here, I ought!”

Mrs. Romayne took her hands away from her face and clenched them together.

“You shall not,” she said in a low, steady voice.

“She—she—was an awfully good girl, don’t you know. She’s not—of course she’s not one of our sort, but—she would learn. Mother, after all, why not? Nothing else can—can make it right!”

“Nothing else can ruin you completely!” was the steady answer. “You shall never do it if I can prevent it. I have told you what I would do; think it well over. Think what it would mean to you to have not one farthing but what you can earn! To be cut by every one who knows you! To be without a chance of any kind! I told you that if you married I would disown you! Now I tell you something else! Break off this miserable connection and you shall have, as I said, anything in reason to give the girl in compensation once and for all. Refuse to do so and I will cut off your allowance until you come to your senses!”

“Mother!” he cried fiercely. “By Heaven, mother!”

“You can take your choice!” was the unmoved answer.

Her face was sharp and haggard; the artificial colour stood out on it in great patches, throwing into relief the vivid pallor beneath. She had thrown aside her cloak as though the physical oppression was unbearable to her, and the contrast between her face and her gorgeous dress with its glittering ornaments was horrible.

A smothered oath broke from the young man, and lifting his right hand, he began to rub it slowly up and down the back of his head as an expression of heavy, fierce cogitation settled down upon his face. To his unutterable surprise, as he made the gesture, there stole over his mother’s face an expression of such deadly terror as he had never before seen. He stopped involuntarily, and she staggered to her feet, holding out two quivering, imploring hands. For the first time in his life Julian was using a gesture habitual in his dead father; for the first time in his life, looking into her son’s face, Mrs. Romayne saw there the face of William Romayne.

“My boy!” she gasped. “My boy. Don’t do that! Don’t look like that, for Heaven’s sake! For Heaven’s sake!”

She swayed for a moment to and fro, and then fell heavily forward into his arms.