here?" Augustine inquired.

"Into the world--the world she is so fitted to adorn. It's ridiculous
this--this fad of hers," said Lady Elliston.

"Is it a fad?" Augustine asked, but with at once a lightness and
distance of manner.

"Of course. And it is bad for anyone to be immured."

"I don't think it has been bad for her. Perhaps this is more the world
than you think."

"I only mean bad in the sense of sad."

"Isn't the world sad?"

"What a strange young man you are. Do you really mean to say that you
like to see your mother--your beautiful, lovely mother--imprisoned in
this gloomy place and meeting nobody from one year's end to the other?"

"I have said nothing at all about my likes," said Augustine, smiling.

Lady Elliston gazed at him. He startled her almost as much as his mother
had done. What a strange young man, indeed; what strange echoes of his
father and mother in him. But she had to grope for the resemblances to
Paul Quentin; they were there; she felt them; but they were difficult to
see; while it was easy to see the resemblances to Amabel. His father was
like a force, a fierceness in him, controlled and guided by an influence
that was his mother. And where had he found, at nineteen, that
assurance, an assurance without his father's vanity or his mother's
selflessness? Paul Quentin had been assured because he was so absolutely
sure of his own value; Amabel was assured because, in her own eyes, she
was valueless; this young man seemed to be without self-reference or
self-effacement; but he was quite self-assured. Had he some mental
talisman by which he accurately gauged all values, his own included? He
seemed at once so oddly above yet of the world. She pulled herself
together to remember that he was, only, nineteen, and that she had had
motives in coming, and that if these motives had been good they were now
better.

"You have said nothing; but I am going to ask you to say something"; she
smiled back at him. "I am going to ask you to say that you will take me
on trust. I am your friend and your mother's friend."

"Since when, my mother's?" Augustine asked. His amiability of aspect
remained constant.

"Since twenty years."

"Twenty years in which you have not seen your friend."

"I know that that looks strange. But when one shuts oneself away into a
cloister one shuts out friends."

"Does one?"

"You won't trust me?"

"I don't know anything about you, except that you have made my mother
i