you don't go, she will."

"Abbott?"

"Yes. Going alone; would start this evening. I offered to write; she
said it was 'too late!' Too late! The child, if you please--Irma's
brother--to live with her, to be brought up by her and her father at our
very gates, to go to school like a gentleman, she paying. Oh, you're a
man! It doesn't matter for you. You can laugh. But I know what people
say; and that woman goes to Italy this evening."

He seemed to be inspired. "Then let her go! Let her mess with Italy by
herself. She'll come to grief somehow. Italy's too dangerous, too--"

"Stop that nonsense, Philip. I will not be disgraced by her. I WILL have
the child. Pay all we've got for it. I will have it."

"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't
understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her,
or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an
English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind
him that's upset people from the beginning of the world."

"Harriet!" exclaimed his mother. "Harriet shall go too. Harriet, now,
will be invaluable!" And before Philip had stopped talking nonsense, she
had planned the whole thing and was looking out the trains.

Chapter 6

Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height
of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes
under the beams of a vertical sun. He now had every opportunity of
seeing her at her best, for it was nearly the middle of August before he
went out to meet Harriet in the Tirol.

He found his sister in a dense cloud five thousand feet above the sea,
chilled to the bone, overfed, bored, and not at all unwilling to be
fetched away.

"It upsets one's plans terribly," she remarked, as she squeezed out her
sponges, "but obviously it is my duty."

"Did mother explain it all to you?" asked Philip.

"Yes, indeed! Mother has written me a really beautiful letter. She
describes how it was that she gradually got to feel that we must rescue
the poor baby from its terrible surroundings, how she has tried by
letter, and it is no good--nothing but insincere compliments and
hypocrisy came back. Then she says, 'There is nothing like personal
influence; you and Philip will succeed where I have failed.' She says,
too, that Caroline Abbott has been wonderful."

Philip assented.

"Caroline feels it as keenly almost as us. That is because she