It was because he happened to be in this mood of conscienceless desire, unreflecting longing, that he had been able to listen calmly at the table, the day before, while Wilmott announced Cleopatra's fall. Dimly he had connected his behaviour with her indisposition; but the temptation to continue along his present lines was too great to allow him to dwell profitably upon that aspect of the situation.

Now again, just after he had come down from Brineweald Park to "The Fastness," as was his wont after breakfast, he had scarcely felt a fibre of pity or remorse stir in his body while Mrs. Delarayne had described Cleopatra's second fainting fit to him. He had expressed his sympathy formally, conventionally, like one who had but a few moments to spare for such considerations, and even before Mrs. Delarayne had completed her narrative, had allowed his eyes to wander eagerly all over the garden for a sign of Leonetta.

Rigid and unmoved, he had seen the stir caused by the arrival of the doctor, and later by the departure of Stephen Fearwell on his motor-cycle with an urgent message from Mrs. Delarayne to Sir Joseph to send one of his cars round at once for her immediate use.

What the car was wanted for, how it was connected with Cleopatra's illness, he hadn't either the inclination or the interest to discover; he only deplored the destiny that caused Cleopatra's breakdown when, suddenly, without Mrs. Delarayne's having made any mention of the plan to him, Leonetta, dazzling, electrifying, and elfish as usual, tripped out into the garden to whisper to him that her mother wished her to drive with her to Ashbury at once.

"To Ashbury--you--at once--with the Warrior?" he ejaculated. "Whatever for?"

"I don't know," said Leonetta.

"But it's impossible," he objected. "Can't you say you can't go?"

"I wish I could."

"But why should the old Warrior want to take precisely you to Ashbury?"

he pursued.

"I only know," she replied, "that Lord Henry's Sanatorium is at Ashbury, and that Peachy's making far too much of Cleo's illness. Why, it's only the heat."

"How many miles is it to Ashbury?"

"Seventeen to twenty, I believe."

"So you'll be gone about two hours?"

"Yes, my darling,--cheer up."

He smiled at these words, pressed her hand tenderly as he did so, and heard the car glide round the drive.

"Good-bye, my goddess," he whispered.

Then suddenly Mrs. Delarayne's head appeared at one of the bedroom windows of the house.

"Come in and get ready at once, Leonetta!" she called out angrily. "The car has just arrived."

"Good-bye, my angel," she whispered, and ran in.

It was eleven o'clock; they could be back for lunch. The Fearwells, Vanessa, and Guy Tyrrell had gone to Stonechurch for a bathe. The whole place was a desert. He thought he might go for a walk, and entered the house to fetch his hat and stick. But he hesitated; he felt so desolate alone. The sound, however, of another car in the drive outside, and Sir Joseph's voice giving instructions to the chauffeur, brought him quickly to his senses, and snatching his hat down, he ran out of the house, through the garden, and out into the meadows beyond.

It was a glorious day. He had no wish to try to account for his reluctance to meet his chief alone at that moment, and as he swung his stick and whistled on his walk, he tried to convince himself that he could afford to snap his fingers at the powerful City magnate.

Meanwhile Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta were racing along as swiftly as Sir Joseph's head chauffeur dared to go. The road and the hedges on either side seemed to be simply a green-edged ribbon which the bonnet of the car cut into two gigantic streamers that flew for miles and miles behind them. Villages were skirted as far as possible, and appeared to be packed hurriedly away like so much stage scenery. Narrow bridges and awkward turnings were negotiated at top speed, and seemed to be cleared more by good luck than skilled driving; but still the pace was not sufficiently hard for Mrs. Delarayne, who, sitting almost erect in the car, with neck craned and eyes fixed on the farthest horizon, spoke scarcely a word to her companion.

The mother instinct had been roused in the heart of this elegant, youth-loving widow,--that, and also the complex emotions provoked by the fact that, since her last momentous interview with Lord Henry, she had not heard from him.

It had cost her a good deal to decide upon this step. For reasons which she had refrained from investigating, she had not introduced Lord Henry to her daughters. At first the omission had been the outcome of a series of pure accidents, quite beyond her control. Then, as she acquired the habit of meeting him alone, or at least unaccompanied by her offspring, her relationship to him had at last seemed to derive part of its essential character from this very exclusiveness. He appeared to belong to her. The thought of one of her daughters becoming perhaps attached to him filled her with vague qualms, as if her relationship to him would thereby be marred. Thenceforward intention or design began to take the place of accident, and her daughters had been rigorously excluded whenever Lord Henry and the widow met.

And now, in a moment of stress, in a mood of deep anxiety concerning a daughter who, despite the radical difficulty of daughter-and-mother relationships, had been on the whole singularly devoted and sensible, she had resolved to reverse the old order, to invite Lord Henry to "The Fastness," and thus necessarily to let her daughters meet him.

The sight of the blundering local practitioner that morning had revealed to her the danger of excluding Lord Henry any longer from her family affairs. Her difficulties had become too heavy. She knew that he and he alone could assist her; and she determined to enlist his help. Thus her principal "secret" man, the most cherished of all her clandestine male attachments, was to be brought by her own hand, by her own act and exertion, into the presence of charms far more magnetic, far more irresistible than any she could now hope to wield, and which were all the more apparent to her for being so much like her own. This was indeed a surrender of principle which showed that Mrs. Delarayne's maternal instinct had been moved to action; but its energy in this case, creditable as it was, fell so far short of what it might have been in the case of a beloved son, that the widow far from being happy, was conscious only of being urged by painful duty upon the errand she was now fulfilling.

The presence of Leonetta in the car, though an insoluble mystery to the child herself, was accounted for simply as an obvious manoeuvre on the part of an angry and ingenious woman of the world, to retaliate to some extent upon the chief cause of all her trouble, the annoyance and disturbance he had occasioned her. But she was too sensible to upbraid the girl herself. She knew how fatally decisive opposition might prove at this stage in Leonetta's sudden excitement over Denis Malster, and she resolved to be guided in the whole of the complicated business by the sure hand of Lord Henry.

To Leonetta's secretly guilty heart, however, her mother's silence seemed to remove the one possible explanation that yet remained for her having been made to drive to Ashbury; and by the time three quarters of the journey had been accomplished, she resigned herself to a mood of mystified boredom.

Occasionally her mother would mutter anxiously: "I wonder whether Lord Henry will be in";--but that was all. Her affability and good nature seemed to be the same as usual.

At last the car drew up at the northern outskirts of Ashbury, before a building that appeared to Leonetta as unlike her mental image of a sanatorium as anything could possibly be. It was a large building with a white stucco front, badly cracked all over,--evidently a sort of old manor house of about the period of George IV,--and the sight of the smart motor cars drawn up on either side of the road in front of its partly dilapidated gate, seemed but to enhance the general impression of decay which characterised both the house and its surroundings.

The string of cars, however, brought a smile to Mrs. Delarayne's lips, for they showed that Lord Henry's clinique was open that day.

"Now wait for me here, in the car," she said in her most positive manner, "however long I am."

Leonetta and Cleopatra knew from experience that when their mother spoke in this way she would brook no disobedience; and so throwing off her dust cloak, Leonetta settled herself in the car to see what interest she could derive from watching the activity at the gate.

Mrs. Delarayne's card sufficed to bring the matron hurrying down with the assurance that Lord Henry would see her next. He was very busy, and had been hard at work for at least a fortnight. There was a room full of people waiting.

"Unusually hard at work!" Mrs. Delarayne observed.

"Yes," replied the matron, "quite exceptional."

"And why is that?" the widow enquired.

"We think it is the heat. The dog days seem somehow to increase nervous trouble in quite a number of people,--at least so Lord Henry says."

"Then you may be sure it is so," said Mrs. Delarayne emphatically. She was taken to a private room, and there in a few minutes Lord Henry joined her.

He listened with his usual earnestness to all she had to tell him, and learned as much as he could from the description of her untrained observation of Cleopatra's symptoms.

"What is it, Lord Henry,--do tell me,--that makes grown-up men of the present day so susceptible to raw flappers? You surely have an explanation!"

"I have," Lord Henry replied, smiling in his malicious way. "It is accounted for by the whole trend of modern sentiment and modern prejudice. It is in the air. It is the result of the nineteenth century's absurd exaltation of rude untrammelled nature. It really amounts to anarchy, because it is always accompanied by a certain feeling of hostility towards law and culture. Hence the love of wild rugged moors and mountains which is a modern mania."

"Oh, didn't the ancients admire these things?" the lady exclaimed a little crestfallen.

"Of course they didn't," Lord Henry replied. "Hence, too, the ridiculous present-day exaltation of childhood, because children are stupidly supposed to trail 'clouds of glory' from whence they come, as that old spinster Wordsworth assures us. In fact everything immature or uncultivated is supposed to be sacrosanct. Of course that young man, Denis Malster, must be a sentimentalist, too, and he probably wants kicking badly; but it is not entirely his fault. The sentiment, as I say, is in the air. We are all threatened with infection. They had it in the eighteenth century in France."

"What can I do?" Mrs. Delarayne demanded.

"Nothing!"

"But I can't let Cleopatra fall about in all directions,--she'll kill herself."

"What did the doctor say?"