ely taken for Alice Lucas, the
girl in the white chiffon, who had piped to Mariette in vain. Not that
he ever now wanted to see her. He had passed into a phase indeed of
refusing all society--except that of George Anderson. A floor of the
Portman Square house was given up to him. Various treatments were being
tried, and as soon as he was strong enough his mother was to take him to
the South. Meanwhile his only pleasure seemed to lie in Anderson's
visits, which however could not be frequent, for the business of the
Conference was heavy, and after the daily sittings were over, the
interviews and correspondence connected with them took much time.

On these occasions, whether early in the morning before the business of
the day began, or in the hour before dinner--sometimes even late at
night--Anderson after his chat with the invalid would descend from
Philip's room to the drawing-room below, only allowing himself a few
minutes, and glancing always with a quickening of the pulse through the
shadows of the large room, to see whether it held two persons or one.
Mrs. Gaddesden was invariably there; a small, faded woman in trailing
lace dresses, who would sit waiting for him, her embroidery on her knee,
and when he appeared would hurry across the floor to meet him, dropping
silks, scissors, handkerchief on the way. This dropping of all her
incidental possessions--a performance repeated night after night, and
followed always by her soft fluttering apologies--soon came to be
symbolic, in Anderson's eyes. She moved on the impulse of the moment,
without thinking what she might scatter by the way. Yet the impulse was
always a loving impulse--and the regrets were sincere.

As to the relation to Anderson, Philip was here the pivot of the
situation exactly as he had been in Canada. Just as his physical
weakness, and the demands he founded upon it had bound the Canadian to
their chariot wheels in the Rockies, so now--_mutatis mutandis_--in
London. Mrs. Gaddesden before a week was over had become pitifully
dependent upon him, simply because Philip was pleased to desire his
society, and showed a flicker of cheerfulness whenever he appeared. She
was torn indeed between her memory of Elizabeth's sobbing, and her
hunger to give Philip the moon out of the sky, should he happen to want
it. Sons must come first, daughters second; such has been the philosophy
of mothers from the beginning. She feared--desperately feared--that
Elizabeth had given