brought me up differently!" He smiled upon
her again, patting her hand.

"What do you mean by the 'usual thing'?"

"Well, family and money, I suppose. As if we hadn't got enough for ten!"

Lady Tatham hesitated.

"One talks in the air," she said, frowning a little. "I can't promise
you, Harry, exactly how I should behave, if--"

"If what?"

"If you put me to the _test_."

"Oh, yes, you can," he said, affectionately. Then he got up restlessly
from the table. "But don't let's talk about it. Somehow I can't stand
it--yet. I just wanted you to know that I liked them--and I'd be glad if
you'd be civil to them--that's all. Hullo--here they are!" For as he
moved across the room he caught sight, through a side window commanding
the park, of a pony-carriage just driving into the wide gravel space
before the house.

"Already? Their pony must have seven-leagued boots, to have caught you up
in this time."

"Oh! I was overtaken by Undershaw, and he kept me talking. He told me the
most extraordinary thing! You've no idea what's been happening at the
Tower. That old brute Melrose! But I say--!" He made a dash across the
room.

"What's the matter?"

"I must go and put those pictures away, in case--"

A far door opened and shut noisily behind him. He was gone.

"In case he asks her to go and see his sitting-room? This is all very
surprising."

Lady Tatham sat on at the tea-table, her chin in her hands. It was quite
true that she had brought up her son with unconventional ideas; that she
had unconventional ideas herself on family and marriage. All the same,
her mind at this moment was in a most conventional state of shock. She
knew it, perceiving quite clearly the irony of the situation. Who were
the Penfolds? A little artist girl?--earning her living--with humble,
perhaps hardly presentable relations--to mate with her glorious, golden
Harry?--Harry whom half the ambitious mothers of England courted and
flattered?

The thought of defeating the mothers of England was however so pleasant
to her sense of humour that she hurriedly abandoned this line of
reflection. What had she been about? to be so blind to Harry's
proceedings? She had been lately absorbed, with that intensity she could
still, at fifty, throw into the most diverse things, in a piece of new
embroidery, reproducing a gorgeous Italian design; and in a religious
novel of Fogazzaro's. Also she had been watching birds, for hours, with a
spy-glass in the park.