"May!" exclaimed Lady Dashwood.

"I thought you were ill, Aunt Lena!" said May amazed at the sight of Lady Dashwood, dressed for dinner and apparently in robust health.

"I _am_ ill," exclaimed Lady Dashwood, and she tapped her forehead. "I'm ill here," and she advanced to meet her niece with open arms.

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Dashwood, hastening up to her aunt.

"I'm still partially sane, May--but--if you hadn't come!" said Lady Dashwood, kissing her niece on both cheeks. She did not finish her sentence.

Mrs. Dashwood put both hands on her aunt's shoulders and examined her face carefully.

"Yes, I see you're quite sane, Aunt Lena."

"Will you minister to a mind--not actually diseased but oppressed by a consuming worry?" asked Lady Dashwood earnestly. "Don't think I'm a humbug--I need you much more, just now, than if I'd been merely ill--with a bilious attack, say. You've saved my life! I wish I could explain--but it is difficult to explain--sometimes."

"I'm glad I've saved your life," said May, and she smiled her peculiar smile.

"I see victory--the battle won--already," said Lady Dashwood, looking at her intently. "I wish I could explain----"

"Let it ooze out, Aunt Lena. I can stay for three days--if you want--if I can really do anything for you----"

"Can't you stay a week?" asked Lady Dashwood. "May, I'm not joking. I want your presence badly--can't you spare the time? Relieve my mind, dear, at once, by telling me you can!"

Lady Dashwood's face suddenly became puckered and her voice was so urgent that May's smile died away.

"If it is really important I'll stay a week. Nothing wrong about you--or--Uncle John?" May looked into her aunt's eyes.

"No!" said Lady Dashwood. "John doesn't like my being away. An old soldier has much to make him sad now, but no----" Then she added in an undertone, "Jim ..." and she stared into her niece's face.

Under the portrait of that bold, handsome, unscrupulous Warden of King's a faithful clock ticked to the pa.s.sing of time. The time it showed now was twenty minutes to eight. Both ladies in silence had turned to the fire and they were now both standing each with one foot on the fender and were looking up at the portrait and not at the clock. Neither of them, however, thought of the portrait. They merely looked at it--as one must look at something.

"Jim," sighed Lady Dashwood. "You don't know him, May."

"Is it he who is ill?" asked May.

"He's not ill. He is terribly depressed at times because so many of his old pupils are gone--for ever. But it's not that, not that that I mean.

You know what learned men are, May?" Lady Dashwood did not ask a question, she was making an a.s.sertion.

May Dashwood still gazed at the portrait but now she lowered her eyelids, looking critically through the narrowed s.p.a.ce with her grey eyes.

"No, I don't know what learned men are," she replied very slowly. "I have met so few."

"Jim has taken----" and again Lady Dashwood hesitated.

"Not to Eau Perrier?" almost whispered Mrs. Dashwood.

"Certainly not," exclaimed Lady Dashwood. "I don't think he has touched alcohol since the War. It's nothing so elementary as that. I feel as if I were treacherous in talking about it--and yet I must talk about it--because you have to help me. A really learned man is so----"

"Do you mean that he knows all about Julius Caesar," said May, "and nothing about himself?"

"I shouldn't mind that so much," said the elder lady, grasping eagerly at this introduction to an a.n.a.lysis of the learned man. "I had better blurt it all out, May. Well--he knows nothing about women----" Lady Dashwood spoke with angry emphasis, but in a whisper.

"Ah!" said Mrs. Dashwood, and now she stared deeply at one particular block of wood that was spitting quietly at the attacking flames. She raised her arm and laid her hand on her aunt Lena's shoulder. Then she squeezed the shoulder slightly as if to gently squeeze out a little more information.

"Jim is--I'm not sure--but I'm suspicious--on the verge of getting into a mess," said her aunt still in a low voice.

"Ah!" said May again. "With some woman?"

"All perfectly proper," said Lady Dashwood, "but--oh, May--it's so unspeakably dreary and desolating."

"Much older than he is?" asked May softly, with an emphasis on "much."

"Very much younger," said Lady Dashwood. "Only eighteen!"

"Not nice then?" asked May again softly.

"Not anything--except pretty--and"--here Lady Dashwood had a strident bitterness in her voice--"and--she has a mother."

"Ah!" said May.

"You know Lady Belinda Scott?" asked Lady Dashwood.

May Dashwood moved her head in a.s.sent. "Not having enough money for everything one wants is the root of all evil?" she said imitating somebody.

"Belinda exactly! And all that you and I believe worth having in life--is no more to her--than to--to a monkey up a tree!"

Mrs. Dashwood spoke thoughtfully. "We've come from monkeys and Lady Belinda thinks a great deal of her ancestry."

"Then you understand why I'm anxious? You can imagine----"

May moved her head in response, and then she suddenly turned her face towards her aunt and said in the same voice in which she had imitated Belinda before--

"If dull people like to be dull, it's no credit to 'em!"

Lady Dashwood laughed, but it was a hard bitter laugh.

"Oh, May, you understand. Well, for the twenty-four hours that Belinda was here, she was on her best behaviour. You see, she had plans! You know her habit of sponging for weeks on people--she finds herself appreciated by the 'Nouveaux Riches.' Her t.i.tle appeals to them. Well, Belinda has never made a home for her one child--not she!"

Mrs. Dashwood's lips moved. "Poor child!" she said softly, and there was something in her voice that made Lady Dashwood aware of what she had momentarily forgotten in her excitement, that the arm resting on her shoulder was the arm of a woman not yet thirty, whose home had suddenly vanished. It had been riddled with bullets and left to die at the retreat from Mons.

Lady Dashwood fell into a sudden silence.

"Go on, dear Aunt Lena," said May Dashwood.

"Well, dear," said Lady Dashwood, drawing in a deep breath, "Linda got wind of my coming here to put Jim straight and she pounced down upon me like a vulture, with Gwen, asked herself for one night, and then talked of 'old days, etc.,' and how she longed for Gwen to see something of our 'old-world city.' So she simply made me keep the child for 'a couple of days,' then 'a week,' and then 'ten days'--and how could I turn the child out of doors? And so--I gave in--like a fool!" Then, after a pause, Lady Dashwood exclaimed--"Imagine Belinda as Jim's mother-in-law!"

"But why should she be?" asked May.