he pages of her book. "You're too selfish--too
sickening."

"Oh dear, dear!" he wonderingly whistled while he wandered back to the
hearth-rug, on which, with his hands behind him, he lingered a while.
He was small and had a slight stoop which somehow gave him
character--character of the insidious sort carried out in the acuteness,
difficult to trace to a source, of his smooth fair face, where the lines
were all curves and the expression all needles. He had the voice of a
man of forty and was dressed--as if markedly not for London--with an
air of experience that seemed to match it. He pulled down his waistcoat,
smoothing himself, feeling his neat hair and looking at his shoes.

"I took your five pounds. Also two of the sovereigns," he went on. "I
left you two pound ten." His mother jerked up her head at this,
facing him in dismay, and, immediately on her feet, passed back to the
secretary. "It's quite as I say," he insisted; "you should have locked
it BEFORE, don't you know? It grinned at me there with all its charming
brasses, and what was I to do? Darling mummy, I COULDN'T start--that was
the truth. I thought I should find something--I had noticed; and I do
hope you'll let me keep it, because if you don't it's all up with me. I
stopped over on purpose--on purpose, I mean, to tell you what I've done.
Don't you call that a sense of honour? And now you only stand and glower
at me."

Mrs. Brookenham was, in her forty-first year, still charmingly pretty,
and the nearest approach she made at this moment to meeting her son's
description of her was by looking beautifully desperate. She had about
her the pure light of youth--would always have it; her head, her figure,
her flexibility, her flickering colour, her lovely silly eyes, her
natural quavering tone, all played together toward this effect by
some trick that had never yet been exposed. It was at the same time
remarkable that--at least in the bosom of her family--she rarely wore
an appearance of gaiety less qualified than at the present juncture;
she suggested for the most part the luxury, the novelty of woe, the
excitement of strange sorrows and the cultivation of fine indifferences.
This was her special sign--an innocence dimly tragic. It gave immense
effect to her other resources. She opened the secretary with the key
she had quickly found, then with the aid of another rattled out a small
drawer; after which she pushed the drawer back, closing the whole thing.
"You t