e was twice pronounced in her
hearing? Why had she left us, as if the bare idea of remaining in our
company was abhorrent to her? The foremost interest of my life was now
the interest of penetrating these mysteries. Walk? I was in such a fever
of expectation that I felt as if I could have walked to the world's end,
if I could only keep my husband by my side, and question him on the way.

"I am quite recovered," I said. "Let us go back, as we came, on foot."

Eustace glanced at the landlady. The landlady understood him.

"I won't intrude my company on you, sir," she said, sharply. "I have
some business to do at Broadstairs, and, now I am so near, I may as well
go on. Good-morning, Mrs. Woodville."

She laid a marked emphasis on my name, and she added one significant
look at parting, which (in the preoccupied state of my mind at that
moment) I entirely failed to comprehend. There was neither time
nor opportunity to ask her what she meant. With a stiff little bow,
addressed to Eustace, she left us as his mother had left us taking the
way to Broadstairs, and walking rapidly.

At last we were alone.

I lost no time in beginning my inquiries; I wasted no words in prefatory
phrases. In the plainest terms I put the question to him:

"What does your mother's conduct mean?"

Instead of answering, he burst into a fit of laughter--loud, coarse,
hard laughter, so utterly unlike any sound I had ever yet heard issue
from his lips, so strangely and shockingly foreign to his character
as _I_ understood it, that I stood still on the sands and openly
remonstrated with him.

"Eustace! you are not like yourself," I said. "You almost frighten me."

He took no notice. He seemed to be pursuing some pleasant train of
thought just started in his mind.

"So like my mother!" he exclaimed, with the air of a man who felt
irresistibly diverted by some humorous idea of his own. "Tell me all
about it, Valeria!"

"Tell _you_!" I repeated. "After what has happened, surely it is your
duty to enlighten _me_."

"You don't see the joke," he said.

"I not only fail to see the joke," I rejoined, "I see something in
your mother's language and your mother's behavior which justifies me in
asking you for a serious explanation."

"My dear Valeria, if you understood my mother as well as I do, a serious
explanation of her conduct would be the last thing in the world that you
would expect from me. The idea of taking my mother seriously!" He burst
ou