o be cleared
more by good luck than skilled driving; but still the pace was not
sufficiently hard for Mrs. Delarayne, who, sitting almost erect in the
car, with neck craned and eyes fixed on the farthest horizon, spoke
scarcely a word to her companion.

The mother instinct had been roused in the heart of this elegant,
youth-loving widow,--that, and also the complex emotions provoked by the
fact that, since her last momentous interview with Lord Henry, she had
not heard from him.

It had cost her a good deal to decide upon this step. For reasons which
she had refrained from investigating, she had not introduced Lord Henry
to her daughters. At first the omission had been the outcome of a series
of pure accidents, quite beyond her control. Then, as she acquired the
habit of meeting him alone, or at least unaccompanied by her offspring,
her relationship to him had at last seemed to derive part of its
essential character from this very exclusiveness. He appeared to belong
to her. The thought of one of her daughters becoming perhaps attached to
him filled her with vague qualms, as if her relationship to him would
thereby be marred. Thenceforward intention or design began to take the
place of accident, and her daughters had been rigorously excluded
whenever Lord Henry and the widow met.

And now, in a moment of stress, in a mood of deep anxiety concerning a
daughter who, despite the radical difficulty of daughter-and-mother
relationships, had been on the whole singularly devoted and sensible,
she had resolved to reverse the old order, to invite Lord Henry to "The
Fastness," and thus necessarily to let her daughters meet him.

The sight of the blundering local practitioner that morning had revealed
to her the danger of excluding Lord Henry any longer from her family
affairs. Her difficulties had become too heavy. She knew that he and he
alone could assist her; and she determined to enlist his help. Thus her
principal "secret" man, the most cherished of all her clandestine male
attachments, was to be brought by her own hand, by her own act and
exertion, into the presence of charms far more magnetic, far more
irresistible than any she could now hope to wield, and which were all
the more apparent to her for being so much like her own. This was indeed
a surrender of principle which showed that Mrs. Delarayne's maternal
instinct had been moved to action; but its energy in this case,
creditable as it was, fell so far short of wha