utter
detachment. "Well, let her come."

"As I'd let her go. I take it as a happy sign SHE won't be at Brander."
He stood with his hand on the knob; he had another quick appeal. "But
after Tuesday?"

Mrs. Brookenham had passed half round the room with the glide that
looked languid but that was really a remarkable form of activity, and
had given a transforming touch, on sofa and chairs, to three or four
crushed cushions. It was all with the hanging head of a broken lily.
"You're to stay till the twelfth."

"But if I AM kicked out?"

It was as a broken lily that she considered it. "Then go to the
Mangers."

"Happy thought! And shall I write?"

His mother raised a little more a window-blind. "No--I will."

"Delicious mummy!" And Harold blew her a kiss.

"Yes, rather"--she corrected herself. "Do write--from Brander. It's the
sort of thing for the Mangers. Or even wire."

"Both?" the young man laughed. "Oh you duck!" he cried. "And from where
will YOU let them have it?"

"From Pewbury," she replied without wincing. "I'll write on Sunday."

"Good. How d'ye do, Duchess?"--and Harold, before he disappeared,
greeted with a rapid concentration of all the shades of familiarity a
large high lady, the visitor he had announced, who rose in the doorway
with the manner of a person used to arriving on thresholds very much as
people arrive at stations--with the expectation of being "met."

II

"Good-bye. He's off," Mrs. Brookenham, who had remained quite on her own
side of the room, explained to her friend.

"Where's he off to?" this friend enquired with a casual advance and a
look not so much at her hostess as at the cushions just rearranged.

"Oh to some places. To Brander to-day."

"How he does run about!" And the Duchess, still with a glance hither
and yon, sank upon the sofa to which she had made her way unaided. Mrs.
Brookenham knew perfectly the meaning of this glance: she had but three
or four comparatively good pieces, whereas the Duchess, rich with the
spoils of Italy, had but three or four comparatively bad. This was
the relation, as between intimate friends, that the Duchess visibly
preferred, and it was quite groundless, in Buckingham Crescent, ever to
enter the drawing-room with an expression suspicious of disloyalty. The
Duchess was a woman who so cultivated her passions that she would have
regarded it as disloyal to introduce there a new piece of furniture in
an underhand way--that is without a f