“Indeed, I am not mocking at you, Peter,” she said, sorely repentant and ashamed of her outburst.  “Forgive me, darling!  I see it was—­not the moment.  You do not understand.  You are thinking only of Sarah, as is natural just now.  It was not the moment for me to be talking of myself.”

“You never used to be selfish,” said Peter, thawing somewhat, as she threw her arms about him, and rested her head against his shoulder.

She laughed rather sadly.  “But perhaps I am growing selfish—­in my old age,” said Peter’s mother.

Later, Lady Mary sought John Crewys in the smoking-room.  He sprang up, smiled at her, and held out his hand.

“So Peter has been confiding his schemes to you?”

“How did you know?”

“I only guessed.  When a man seeks a tete-a-tete so earnestly, it is generally to talk about himself.  Did the schemes include—­Sarah?”

“They include Sarah—­marriage—­travelling—­London—­change of every kind.”

“Already!” cried John, “Bravo, Peter! and hurray for one-and-twenty!  And you are free?”

“Oh, no; I am not to be free.”

“What!  Do his schemes include you?”

“Not altogether.”

“That is surely illogical, if yours are to include him?”

She smiled faintly.  “I am to be always here, to look after the place when he and Sarah are travelling or in London.  I am to live with his aunts.  He wants to be able to think of me as always waiting here to welcome him home, as—­as I have been all his life.  Not actually in this house, because—­Sarah—­my little Sarah—­wouldn’t like that, it seems; but in the Dower House, close by.”

“I see,” said John.  “How delightfully ingenuous, and how pleasingly unselfish a very young man can sometimes be!”

“Ah! don’t laugh at me, John,” she said tremulously.  “Indeed, just now, I cannot bear it.”

“Laugh at you, my queen—­my saint!  How little you know me!” said John, tenderly.  “It was at Peter that I was presuming to smile.”

“Is it a laughing matter?” she said wistfully.

“I think it will be, Mary.”

“I tried so hard to tell him,” said Lady Mary, “but I couldn’t.  Somehow he made it impossible.  He looks upon me as quite, quite old.”

John laughed outright.  A laugh that rang true even to Lady Mary’s sensitive perceptions.

“But didn’t you look upon everybody over thirty as, quite old when you were one-and-twenty?  I’m sure I did.”

“Perhaps.  But yet—­I don’t know.  I am his mother.  It is natural he should feel so.  He made me realize how preposterous it was for me, the mother of a grown-up son, to be thinking selfishly of my own happiness, as though I were a young, fresh girl just starting life.”

“I had hoped,” said John, quietly, “that you might be thinking a little of my happiness too.”

“Oh, John!  But your happiness and mine seemed all the same thing,” she said ingenuously.  “Yet he thinks of my life as finished; and I was thinking of it as though it were beginning all over again.  He made me feel so ashamed, so conscience-stricken.”  She hid her face in her hands.  “How could I tell him?”