“I suppose—­because I can’t help it,” she said, startled.

“You are a free agent.”

“You mean that I could go away?” she said, in a low voice.  “But there is only one place I should care to go to now.”

“To South Africa?”

“You always understand,” she said gratefully.

“Supposing this—­this ghastly war should not be over as soon as we all hope,” he said, rather huskily, “I could escort you myself, in a few weeks’ time, to the Cape.  Or—­or arrange for your going earlier if you desired, and if I could not get away.  Probably you would get no further than Cape Town; but it might be easier for you waiting there—­than here.”

“I shall thank you, and bless you always, for thinking of it,” she interrupted, softly; “but there is something—­that I never told anybody.”

He waited.

“After Peter had the news of his father’s death,” said Lady Mary, with a sob in her throat, “you did not know that he—­he telegraphed to me, from Madeira.  He foresaw immediately, I suppose, whither my foolish impulses would lead me; and he asked me—­I should rather say he ordered me—­under no circumstances whatever to follow him out to South Africa.”

John remembered the doctor’s warning, and said nothing.

“So, you see—­I can’t go,” said Lady Mary.

There was a pause.

“I am bound to say,” said John, presently, “that, in Peter’s place, I should not have liked my mother, or any woman I loved, to come out to the seat of war.  He showed only a proper care for you in forbidding it.  Perhaps I am less courageous than he, in thinking more of the present benefit you would derive from the voyage and the change of scene, than of the perils and discomforts which might await you, for aught we can foretell now, at the end of it.  Peter certainly showed judgment in telegraphing to you.”

“Do you really think so?  That it was care for me that made him do it?” she asked.  A distant doubtful joy sounded in her voice.  “Somehow I never thought of that.  I remembered his old dislike of being followed about, or taken care of, or—­or spied upon, as he used to call it.”

“Boys just turning into men are often sensitive on those points,” said John, heedful always of the doctor’s warning.

“It is odd I did not see the telegram in that light,” said poor Lady Mary.  “I must read it again.”

She spoke as hopefully as though she had not read it already a hundred times over, trying to read loving meanings, that were not there, between the curt and peremptory lines.

“It is not odd,” thought John to himself; “it is because you knew him too well;” and he wondered whether his explanation of Peter’s action were charitable, or merely unscrupulous.

But Lady Mary was not really deceived; only very grateful to the man who was so tender of heart, so tactful of speech, as to make it seem even faintly possible that she had misjudged her boy.