have been impossible."

There was a pause. Lady Calmady rose. The young man spoke with
conviction, yet her anxiety was not altogether allayed.

"Impossible," he repeated. "Pretty mother don't disquiet yourself.
Trust me. To tell you the truth I have felt to-day--is it very
foolish?--that I should like some one of my own age for a little while,
as--don't you know--a playfellow."

Katherine bent down and kissed him. But mother-love is not, even in its
most self-sacrificing expression, without torments of jealousy.

"My dear, you shall have your playfellow," she said, though conscious
of a tightening of the muscles of her beautiful throat. "Good-night.
Sleep well."

She went out, closing the door behind her. The perspective of the
dimly-lighted corridor, and the great hall beyond, struck her as rather
sadly lifeless and silent. What wonder, indeed, that Richard should ask
for a companion, for something young! Love made her selfish and
cowardly she feared. She should have thought of this before. She turned
back, again opening the Gun-Room door.

Richard had raised himself. He stood on the seat of the chair,
steadying himself by one hand on the chair-back, while with the other
he pulled the rug from beneath the sleepy bull-dog.

"Wake up, you lazy old beggar," he was saying. "Get down, can't you. I
want to go to bed, and you block the way, lying there in gross comfort,
snoring. Make yourself scarce, old man. If I'd your natural advantages
in the way of locomotion, I wouldn't be so slow of using them----"

He looked up, and slipped back into a sitting position hastily.

"Oh, mother, I thought you had gone!" he exclaimed, almost sharply.

And to Katherine, overstrung as she was, the words came as a rebuke.

"My dearest, I won't keep you," she said. "I only came back to ask you
about Honoria St. Quentin."

"What about her?"

"She is staying at Newlands--the two girls are friends, I believe. She
seemed to me a fine creature when last I saw her. She knows the world,
yet struck me curiously untouched by it. She is well read, she has
ideas--some of them a little extravagant, but time will modify that.
Only her head is awake as yet, not her heart, I think. Shall I ask her
to come too?"

"So that we may wake up her heart?" Richard inquired coldly. "No
thanks, dear mother, that's, too serious an undertaking. Have her
another time, please. I saw her to-day, and, no doubt my taste is bad,
but I must confess she did not