"No doubt, Madame," I said, raising my eyes to the figure outside -

"Americain, Catholique et gentilhomme" - walking up and down the
path with a cigar which he was not smoking. "For myself, I don't

know anything about those necessities. I have broken away for ever
from those things."

"Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you. What a golden heart that
is. His sympathies are infinite."

I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his
text on me might have been: "She lives by her wits." Was she

exercising her wits on me for some purpose of her own? And I
observed coldly:

"I really know your son so very little."
"Oh, voyons," she protested. "I am aware that you are very much

younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at
bottom, faintly, of character, of chivalrousdevotion - no, you

must be able to understand him in a measure. He is infinitely
scrupulous and recklessly brave."

I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body
tingling in hostileresponse to the Blunt vibration, which seemed

to have got into my very hair.
"I am convinced of it, Madame. I have even heard of your son's

bravery. It's extremely natural in a man who, in his own words,
'lives by his sword.'"

She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed
"nerves" like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her

it meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.
Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe,

tapped the floor irritably. But even in that display there was
something exquisitelydelicate. The very anger in her voice was

silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-
year-old beauty.

"What nonsense! A Blunt doesn't hire himself."
"Some princely families," I said, "were founded by men who have

done that very thing. The great Condottieri, you know."
It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that

we were not living in the fifteenth century. She gave me also to
understand with some spirit that there was no question here of

founding a family. Her son was very far from being the first of
the name. His importance lay rather in being the last of a race

which had totally perished, she added in a completely drawing-room
tone, "in our Civil War."

She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the
room sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet

unextinguished anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful
white eyebrows. For she was growing old! Oh, yes, she was growing

old, and secretly weary, and perhaps desperate.
CHAPTER III

Without caring much about it I was conscious of sudden
illumination. I said to myself confidently that these two people

had been quarrelling all the morning. I had discovered the secret
of my invitation to that lunch. They did not care to face the

strain of some obstinate, inconclusive discussion for fear, maybe,
of it ending in a serious quarrel. And so they had agreed that I

should be fetched downstairs to create a diversion. I cannot say I
felt annoyed. I didn't care. My perspicacity did not please me

either. I wished they had left me alone - but nothing mattered.
They must have been in their superiority accustomed to make use of

people, without compunction. From necessity, too. She especially.
She lived by her wits. The silence had grown so marked that I had

at last to raise my eyes; and the first thing I observed was that
Captain Blunt was no longer to be seen in the garden. Must have

gone indoors. Would rejoin us in a moment. Then I would leave
mother and son to themselves.

The next thing I noticed was that a great mellowness had descended
upon the mother of the last of his race. But these terms,

irritation, mellowness, appeared gross when applied to her. It is
impossible to give an idea of the refinement and subtlety of all

her transformations. She smiled faintly at me.
"But all this is beside the point. The real point is that my son,

like all fine natures, is a being of strange contradictions which
the trials of life have not yet reconciled in him. With me it is a

little different. The trials fell mainly to my share - and of
course I have lived longer. And then men are much more complex

than women, much more difficult, too. And you, Monsieur George?
Are you complex, with unexpected resistances and difficulties in

your etre intime - your inner self? I wonder now . . ."
The Blunt atmosphere seemed to vibrate all over my skin. I

disregarded the symptom. "Madame," I said, "I have never tried to
find out what sort of being I am."

"Ah, that's very wrong. We ought to reflect on what manner of
beings we are. Of course we are all sinners. My John is a sinner

like the others," she declared further, with a sort of proud
tenderness as though our common lot must have felt honoured and to

a certain extent purified by this condescendingrecognition.
"You are too young perhaps as yet . . . But as to my John," she

broke off, leaning her elbow on the table and supporting her head
on her old, impeccably shaped, white fore-arm emerging from a lot

of precious, still older, lace trimming the short sleeve. "The
trouble is that he suffers from a profounddiscord between the

necessary reactions to life and even the impulses of nature and the
lofty idealism of his feelings; I may say, of his principles. I

assure you that he won't even let his heart speak uncontradicted."
I am sure I don't know what particular devil looks after the

associations of memory, and I can't even imagine the shock which it
would have been for Mrs. Blunt to learn that the words issuing from

her lips had awakened in me the visual perception of a dark-
skinned, hard-driven lady's maid with tarnished eyes; even of the

tireless Rose handing me my hat while breathing out the enigmatic
words: "Madame should listen to her heart." A wave from the

atmosphere of another house rolled in, overwhelming and fiery,
seductive and cruel, through the Blunt vibration, bursting through

it as through tissue paper and filling my heart with sweet murmurs
and distracting images, till it seemed to break, leaving an empty

stillness in my breast.
After that for a long time I heard Mme. Blunt mere talking with

extreme fluency and I even caught the individual words, but I could
not in the revulsion of my feelings get hold of the sense. She

talked apparently of life in general, of its difficulties, moral
and physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts,

of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the
sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the

nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the
privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first

connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the
general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and

in the particular instance of it on which she had opened to him her
innermost heart. Mills had a universal mind. His sympathy was

universal, too. He had that large comprehension - oh, not cynical,
not at all cynical, in fact rather tender - which was found in its

perfection only in some rare, very rare Englishmen. The dear
creature was romantic, too. Of course he was reserved in his

speech but she understood Mills perfectly. Mills apparently liked
me very much.

It was time for me to say something. There was a challenge in the
reposeful black eyes resting upon my face. I murmured that I was

very glad to hear it. She waited a little, then uttered meaningly,
"Mr. Mills is a little bit uneasy about you."

"It's very good of him," I said. And indeed I thought that it was
very good of him, though I did ask myself vaguely in my dulled

brain why he should be uneasy.
Somehow it didn't occur to me to ask Mrs. Blunt. Whether she had

expected me to do so or not I don't know but after a while she
changed the pose she had kept so long and folded her wonderfully

preserved white arms. She looked a perfect picture in silver and
grey, with touches of black here and there. Still I said nothing