Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:

"They wouldn't be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood--" But the muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.

"I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent," said Adelaide, almost airily, "but this sort of thing can't go on, really, you know."

"No, it really can't," said Mr. Lanley. "We feel you have abused our confidence."

"No, I don't reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines," said Adelaide. "He owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we won't discuss that now. It isn't anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has made a mistake. Five years from now, I'm sure, he would not put himself, or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I don't say that if he came back five years from now with some financial standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only in the meantime there can be no engagement." Adelaide looked very reasonable. "You must see that."

"You mean I'm not to see him?"

"Of course not."

"I must see him," said Mathilde.

Lanley looked at Wayne.

"This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be man enough to promise you won't see her until you are in a position to ask her to be your wife."

"I have asked her that already, you know," returned Wayne with an attempt at a smile.

"Pete, you wouldn't desert me?" said Mathilde.

"If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a house where he was unwelcome," said her mother.

"I'm afraid I haven't any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron."

Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions, she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn't.

"Mathilde,"--Wayne spoke very gently,--"don't you think you could stop crying?"

"I'm trying all the time, Pete. You won't go away, no matter what they say?"

"Of course not."

"It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as opposed to what you think best--for yourself," observed Adelaide.

"n.o.body wants to turn you out of the house, you know," said Mr. Lanley in a conciliatory tone, "but the engagement is at an end."

"If you do turn him out, I'll go with him," said Mathilde, and she took his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.

They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand that Lanley found himself relenting.

"We don't say that your marriage will never be possible," he said. "We are asking you to wait--consent to a separation of six months."

"Six months!" wailed Mathilde.

"With your whole life before you?" her grandfather returned wistfully.

"I'm afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa," said Adelaide. "I have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was watching and trying to be cooperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but I don't think, I don't really think,"--Adelaide made it evident that she was being just,--"that any other of all the young men who come to the house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got themselves into this difficulty. I mean,"--she looked up at Wayne,--"I think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment than you have shown."

"Mama," put in her daughter, "can't you see how honest it was of Pete not to go, anyhow?"

Adelaide smiled ironically.

"No; I can't think that an unusually high standard, dear."

This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.

"O Pete, wouldn't your mother take me in?" she asked.

And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced Mrs. Wayne.

CHAPTER XIV

In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.

Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.

Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide's feelings may have been, she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only one who did.

Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at once decided to withdraw.

"Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron," she said. "I came to ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family discussion, and so I won't--"

Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son's life to others.

Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.

"You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne," she said. "Now you have come, we can settle the whole question."

"And just what is the question?" asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down, looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew everything, though she had avoided Pete's full confidence. She knew simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did not have long to wait.

"You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run away with my daughter?"

All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:

"Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?"

"Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Wayne. "Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.

Pete didn't tell me about it, though."

"But I did tell Mrs. Farron," said Pete.

Adelaide protested at once.