MOTHER and son dined alone together, and then, rather early, Mrs. Tropenell went upstairs.

For a while, perhaps as long as an hour, she sat up in bed, reading. At last, however, she turned off the switch of her electric reading lamp, and, lying back in her old-fashioned four-post bed, she shut her eyes for a few moments. Then she opened them, widely, on to her moonlit room.

Opposite to where she lay the crescent-shaped bow-window was still open to the night air and the star-powdered sky. On that side of Freshley Manor the wide lawn sloped down to a belt of water meadows, and beyond the meadows there rose steeply a high, flat-topped ridge.

Along this ridge Oliver Tropenell was now walking up and down smoking. Now and again his mother saw the shadow-like figure move across the line of her vision.

At one moment, last winter, she had feared that he would not be able to come back this year, as troubles had arisen among his cattle-men. But, as was Oliver's way, he had kept his promise. That he had been able to so do was in no small measure owing to his partner, Gilbert Baynton.

Gilbert Baynton—Laura Pavely's brother? Of that ne'er-do-weel Oliver had made from a failure a success; from a waster—his brother-in-law, Godfrey Pavely, would have called him by a harsher name—an acute and a singularly successful man of business.

Lying there, her brain working quickly in the darkness, Oliver's mother told herself that the Pavelys, both Godfrey and Laura, had indeed reason to be grateful, not only to Oliver, but to her, Oliver's mother! It was to please her, not them, that Oliver, long years ago, had accepted the dubious gift of Gilbert Baynton, and the small sum Gilbert's brother-in-law had reluctantly provided to rid himself of an intolerable incubus and a potential source of disgrace. Godfrey Pavely was certainly grateful, and never backward in expressing it. And Laura? Laura was one of your silent, inarticulate women, but without doubt Laura must be grateful too.

At last Oliver left the ridge, and Mrs. Tropenell went on gazing at the vast expanse of luminous sky which merged into the uplands stretching away for miles beyond the boundaries of her garden.

She lay, listening intently, and very soon she heard the cadence of his firm footfalls on the stone path below the window. Then came the quiet unlatching of the garden door. Now he was coming upstairs.

Her whole heart leapt out to him—and perchance it was this strong shaft of wordless longing that caused Oliver Tropenell's feet to linger as he was going past his mother's door.

Following a sudden impulse, she, who had trained herself to do so few things on impulse, called out, "Is that you, my darling?"

The door opened. "Yes, mother. Here I am. May I come in?"

He turned and shut out the bright electric light on the landing, and walked, a little slowly and uncertainly in the darkness, towards where he knew the bed to be. For a moment she wondered whether she should turn on the lamp which was at her elbow, then some sure, secret instinct made her refrain.

She put out her hand, and pulled him down to her, and he, so chary of caress, put his left arm round her.

"Mother?" he said softly. "This dear old room! It's years since I've been in this room—and yet from what I can see, it's exactly the same as it always was!"

And, as if answering an unspoken question, she spoke in very low tones, "Hardly altered at all since the day you were born here, my dearest, on the happiest day of my life."

His strong arm tightened about her a little, and, still looking straight before her, but leaning perhaps a little closer into the shelter of his arm, she said tremulously, inconsequently it might have seemed: "Oliver? Are you going to accept Lord St. Amant's invitation?"

With a sharp shoot of hidden pain she felt his movement of recoil, but all he said was, very quietly, "I've not quite made up my mind, mother."

"It would give me pleasure if you were to do so. He has been a very good and loyal friend to me for a long, long time, my dear."

"I know that."

She waited a moment, then forced herself to go on: "You were never quite fair to St. Amant, Oliver."

"I—I feared him, mother."

And then, as she uttered an inarticulate murmur of pain and of protest, he went on quickly, "The fear didn't last very long—perhaps for two or three years. You see I was so horribly afraid that you were going to marry him." In the darkness he was saying something he had never meant, never thought to say.

And she answered, "It was a baseless fear."

"Was it? I wonder if it was! Oh, of course I know you are telling me the truth as you see it now—but, but surely, mother?"

"Surely no, Oliver. It is true that St. Amant wished, after his wife's death, that I should marry him, but he soon saw that I did not wish it, that nothing was further from my wish—then."

"Then?" he cried. "What do you mean, mother? Lady St. Amant only died when I was fifteen!"

"I would like to tell you what I mean. And after I have told you, I wish never to speak of this subject to you again. But I owe it to myself as well as to you, to tell you the truth, Oliver. Where is your hand?" she said, "let me hold it while I tell you."

And then slowly and with difficulty she began speaking, with a hesitation, a choosing of her words, which were in sharp contrast to her usual swift decision.

"I want to begin by telling you," her voice was very low, "that according to his lights—the lights of a man of the world and of, well yes, of an English gentleman—St. Amant behaved very well as far as I was concerned. I want you to understand that, Oliver, to understand it thoroughly, because it's the whole point of my story. If St. Amant had behaved less well, I should have nothing to tell—you."

She divined the quiver of half-shamed relief which went through her son. It made what she wished to say at once easier and more difficult.

"As I think you know, I first met St. Amant when I was very young, in fact before I was 'out,' and he was the first really clever, really attractive, and, in a sense, really noted man I had ever met. And then"—she hesitated painfully.

"And then, mother?" Oliver's voice was hard and matter-of-fact. He was not making it easy for her.

"Well, my dear, very very soon, he made of me his friend, and I was of course greatly flattered, but at that time, in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Amant never made love to me." She went on more firmly. "Of course I soon came to know that he cared for me in a way he did not care for the other women with whom his name was associated. I knew very soon too, deep in my heart, that if his wife—his frivolous, mean-natured, tiresome wife—died, he certainly would wish to marry me, and for years, Oliver, for something like six years, I daily committed murder in my heart."

And then something happened which troubled and greatly startled the woman who was making this painful confession. Her son gave a kind of cry—a stifled cry which was almost a groan. "God! How well I understand that!" he said.

"Do you, Oliver—do you? And yet I, looking back, cannot understand it! All that was best, indeed the only good that was in St. Amant to give I had then, and later, after I became a widow, I had it again."

"I suppose he was much the same then as later, or—or was he different then, mother?"

She knew what he meant. "He was the same then," she said quietly, "but somehow I didn't care! Girls were kept so ignorant in those days. But of course the whole world knew he was a man of pleasure, and in time I grew to know it too. But still it wasn't that which made me unhappy, for I did not realise what the phrase meant, still less what was implied by it. But even so, as time went on I was very unhappy. Mine was a false position—a position which hurt my pride, and, looking back, I suppose that there must have soon been a certain amount of muffled talk. If I was not jealous, other women were certainly jealous of me."

She waited for a few moments; the stirring of these long-dead embers was hurting her more than she would have thought possible.

At last she went on: "Sometimes months would pass by without our meeting, but he wrote to me constantly, and on his letters—such amusing, clever, and yes, tender letters—I lived. My aunt, my father, both singularly blind to the state of things, were surprised and annoyed that I didn't marry, and, as for me, I grew more and more unhappy."

"Poor mother!" muttered Oliver. And she sighed a sigh of rather piteous relief. She had not thought he would understand.

"I don't know what I should have done but for two people, your father, who of course was living here then, our nearest neighbour, and, what meant very much more to me just then, Laura's mother, Alice Tropenell. Though she was only a very distant relation, she was like a daughter in this house. Alice was my one friend. She knew everything about me. She was—well, Oliver, I could never tell you what she was to me then!"

"I suppose," he said slowly, "that Laura is like her?"

"Laura?" Mrs. Tropenell could not keep the surprise out of her low voice. "Oh no, my dear, Laura is not in the least like her mother. But Laura's child is very like Alice—even now."

"Laura's child?" Oliver Tropenell visioned the bright, high-spirited, merry little girl, who somehow, he could not have told her why, seemed often to be a barrier between himself and Laura.

"Alice—my friend Alice—was full of buoyancy, of sympathy for every living thing. She possessed what I so much lacked in those days, and still alas! lack—sound common-sense. And yet she, too, had her ideals, ideals which did not lead her into a very happy path, for Robert Baynton, high-minded though he may have been, was absorbed in himself—there was no room for any one else." Had she been telling her story to any one but her son, Mrs. Tropenell would have added, "Laura is very like him."

Instead, she continued, "No one but Alice would have made Robert Baynton happy, or have made as good a thing of the marriage as she did—for happy they were. I think it was the sight of their happiness that made me at last long for something different, for something more normal in my life than that strange, unreal tie with St. Amant. So at last, when I was four-and-twenty, I married your father." Oliver remained silent, and she said a little tremulously, "He was very, very good to me. He made me a happy woman. He gave me you."

There was a long, long pause. Mrs. Tropenell had now come to what was the really difficult part of the task she had set herself.

"You are thinking, my boy, of afterwards." And as she felt him move restlessly, she went on pleadingly, "As to that, I ask you to remember that I was very lonely after your father died. Still, if you wish to know the real truth"—she would be very honest now—"that friendship which you so much disliked stood more in the way of your having a stepfather than anything else could have done."

"I see that now," he said sombrely, "but I did not see it then, mother."

"Even if Lady St. Amant had not lived on, as she did, all those years, I should not have married St. Amant—I think I can say that in all sincerity. So you see, Oliver, you need not have been afraid, when at last he became free."

She sighed a long, unconscious sigh of relief.

"I gather you still see him very often when he's at Knowlton Abbey?"

"Yes, it's become a very comfortable friendship, Oliver. But for St. Amant I should often feel very lonely, my dear."

She longed to go on—to tell Oliver how hard it had been for her to build up her life afresh—after he had finally decided to stay on in Mexico. But she doubted if he would understand....

Suddenly he turned and kissed her.

"Good-night," he said. "I'm grateful to you for having told me all—all that you have told me, mother."

Oliver Tropenell hurried up the silent house. By his own wish the large garret to which he had removed all his own treasures and boyish belongings after a delicate childhood spent in a room close to his mother's, was still in his room, and it had been very little altered.

It was reached by a queer, narrow, turning staircase across which at a certain point a beam jutted out too low. Tropenell never forgot to duck his head at that point—indeed he generally remembered as he did so how proud he had been the first time he had found himself to be too tall to pass under it straightly! But, strange to say, to-night he did forget—and for a moment he saw stars.... Fool! Fool that he was to allow his wits to go wool-gathering in this fashion!

With eyes still smarting, he leapt up the last few steps to the little landing which he shared with no one else. Opening the door he turned the switch of the lamp on the writing-table which stood at a right angle to the deep-eaved window.

Then he shut the door and locked it, and, after a moment of indecision, walked across to the book-case which filled up the space between the fireplace and the inner wall of the long, rafted room.

He did not feel in the mood to go to bed, and idly he let his eyes run over the long rows of books which he had read, in the long ago, again and again, for like most lonely boys he had been a great reader. They were a good selection, partly his mother's, partly his own, partly Lord St. Amant's. He knew well enough—he had always known, albeit the knowledge gave him no pleasure, that he had owed a great deal, as boy and man, to his mother's old friend. Lord St. Amant had really fine taste. It was he who had made Oliver read Keats, Blake, Byron, Poe, among poets; he who had actually given him Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, The Three Musketeers, Ali Baba of Ispahan. There they were all together.

He had not taken his books with him when he had first gone to Mexico, for he had not meant to stay there. But at last he had written home to a great London bookseller and ordered fresh copies of all his old books at home. The bookseller had naturally chosen good editions, in some cases rare first editions. But those volumes had never been read, as some of these had been read, over and over and over again.

But now, to-night, he did not feel as if he could commune with any comfort even with one of these comfortable, unexacting friends. He felt too restless, too vividly alive. So suddenly he turned away from the bookcase, and looked about him. A large French box-bed had taken the place of the narrow, old-fashioned bedstead of his youth; and his mother had had moved up to this room a narrow writing-table from the study on the ground floor which no one ever used.

He walked over to that writing-table now, and sat down. On it, close to his left hand, stood a large despatch-box. He opened and took out of it a square sheet of paper on which was embossed his Mexican address. Drawing two lines across that address, and putting in the present date, September 19th, he waited, his pen poised in his hand for a full minute.

Then he began writing rather quickly, and this is what he wrote:—

"My dear Laura,—Godfrey suggests that I should act as your trustee, in succession to Mr. Blackmore. Am I to understand that this suggestion has your approval? If yes, I will of course consent to act. But please do not think I shall be offended if you decide otherwise. You may prefer some woman of your acquaintance. Women, whatever Godfrey may tell you, make excellent men of business. They are, if anything, over-prudent, over-cautious where money is concerned; but that is a very good fault in a trustee."