she became aware that Sir Tom would look upon it with very
different eyes from theirs. She felt that she had been disloyal to him
in having a secret subject of consultation even with her brother. If he
heard he would be displeased, he would be taken by surprise, perhaps
wounded, perhaps made angry. In any wise it would introduce a new
element into their life. Lucy saw, with a sudden sensation of fright and
pain, an unknown crowd of possibilities which might pour down upon her,
were it to be communicated to Sir Tom that his wife and her brother were
debating as to a course of action on her part, unknown to him. All this
occurred in a moment, and it was not any lucid and real perception of
difficulties, but only a sudden alarmed compunctious consciousness that
filled her mind. She fled, as it were, from the circumstances which made
these horrors possible, hurrying back into her former attitude with a
penitential urgency. Jock, indeed, was very dear to her, but he was no
more than second, nay he was but third, in Lady Randolph's heart. Her
husband's supremacy he could not touch, and though he had been almost
her child in the old days, yet he was not, nor ever would be, her child
in the same ineffable sense as little Tom was, who was her very own, the
centre of her life. So she ran away (so to speak) from Jock with a real
panic, and clung to her husband, conciliating, nay almost wheedling him,
if we may use the word, with a curious feminine instinct, to make up to
him for the momentary wrong she had done, and which he was not aware of.
Sir Tom himself was a little surprised by the warmth of the reception
she gave him. Her interest in his shooting was usually very mild, for
she had never been able to get over a little horror she had, due,
perhaps, to her bourgeois training, of the slaughter of the birds. He
glanced at the pair with an unusual perception that there was something
here more than met the eye. "You have been egging her up to some
rebellion," he said; "Jock, you villain; you have been hatching treason
behind my back!" He said this with one of those cordial laughs which
nobody could refrain from joining--full of good humour and fun, and a
pleased consciousness that to teach Lucy to rebel would be beyond any
one's power. At any other moment she would have taken the accusation
with the tranquil smile which was Lucy's usual reply to her husband's
pleasantries; but this time her laugh was a little strained, and the
warm