I bowed my head in silence.  What I couldn’t understand was why he delayed so long in joining us again.  Unless he had had enough of his mother?  I thought without any great resentment that I was being victimized; but then it occurred to me that the cause of his absence was quite simple.  I was familiar enough with his habits by this time to know that he often managed to snatch an hour’s sleep or so during the day.  He had gone and thrown himself on his bed.

“I admire him exceedingly,” Mrs. Blunt was saying in a tone which was not at all maternal.  “His distinction, his fastidiousness, the earnest warmth of his heart.  I know him well.  I assure you that I would never have dared to suggest,” she continued with an extraordinary haughtiness of attitude and tone that aroused my attention, “I would never have dared to put before him my views of the extraordinary merits and the uncertain fate of the exquisite woman of whom we speak, if I had not been certain that, partly by my fault, I admit, his attention has been attracted to her and his--his—­his heart engaged.”

It was as if some one had poured a bucket of cold water over my head.  I woke up with a great shudder to the acute perception of my own feelings and of that aristocrat’s incredible purpose.  How it could have germinated, grown and matured in that exclusive soil was inconceivable.  She had been inciting her son all the time to undertake wonderful salvage work by annexing the heiress of Henry Allegre—­the woman and the fortune.

There must have been an amazed incredulity in my eyes, to which her own responded by an unflinching black brilliance which suddenly seemed to develop a scorching quality even to the point of making me feel extremely thirsty all of a sudden.  For a time my tongue literally clove to the roof of my mouth.  I don’t know whether it was an illusion but it seemed to me that Mrs. Blunt had nodded at me twice as if to say:  “You are right, that’s so.”  I made an effort to speak but it was very poor.  If she did hear me it was because she must have been on the watch for the faintest sound.

“His heart engaged.  Like two hundred others, or two thousand, all around,” I mumbled.

“Altogether different.  And it’s no disparagement to a woman surely.  Of course her great fortune protects her in a certain measure.”

“Does it?” I faltered out and that time I really doubt whether she heard me.  Her aspect in my eyes had changed.  Her purpose being disclosed, her well-bred ease appeared sinister, her aristocratic repose a treacherous device, her venerable graciousness a mask of unbounded contempt for all human beings whatever.  She was a terrible old woman with those straight, white wolfish eye-brows.  How blind I had been!  Those eyebrows alone ought to have been enough to give her away.  Yet they were as beautifully smooth as her voice when she admitted:  “That protection naturally is only partial.  There is the danger of her own self, poor girl.  She requires guidance.”