“No, you don’t say it, but you think it!” she cried back.  “It is the one thing you have in your mind.  I was unhappy, I did wrong, so I can never be happy, I can never do right!  I am unfit to marry again, to marry a good man, even if he loves me, even if I love him!”

“I neither say nor think anything of the kind,” I reiterated, and with some slight effect this time.  Mrs. Lascelles put no more absurdities into my mouth.

“Then what do you say?” she demanded, her deep voice vibrant with scornful indignation, though there were tears in it too.

“I think he will be a lucky fellow who gets you,” I said, and meant every word, as I looked at her well in the moonlight, with her shining eyes, and curling lip, and fighting flush.

“Thank you, Captain Clephane!”

And I thought I was to be honoured with a contemptuous courtesy; but I was not.

“He ought to be a man, however,” I went on, “and not a boy, and still less the only child of a woman with whom you would never get on.”

“So you are as sure of that,” exclaimed Mrs. Lascelles, “as of everything else!” It seemed, however, to soften her, or at least to change the current of her thoughts.  “Yet you get on with her?” she added with a wistful intonation.

I could not deny that I got on with Catherine Evers.

“You are even fond of her?”

“Quite fond.”

“Then do you find me a very disagreeable person, that she and I couldn’t possibly hit it off, in your opinion?”

“It isn’t that, Mrs. Lascelles,” said I, almost wearily.  “You must know what it is.  You want to marry her son—­”

Mrs. Lascelles smiled.

“Well, let us suppose you do.  That would be quite enough for Mrs. Evers.  No matter who you were, how peerless, how incomparable in every way, she would rather die than let you marry him at his age.  I don’t say she’s wrong—­I don’t say she’s right.  I give you the plain fact for what it is worth:  you would find her from the first a clever and determined adversary, a regular little lioness with her cub, and absolutely intolerant on that particular point.”

I could see Catherine as I spoke, the Catherine I had seen last, and liked least to remember; but the vision faded before the moonlit reality of Mrs. Lascelles, laughing to herself like a great, naughty, pretty child.

“I really think I must marry him,” she said, “and see what happens!”

“If you do,” I answered, in all seriousness, “you will begin by separating mother and son, and end by making both their lives miserable, and bringing the last misery into your own.”

And either my tone impressed her, or the covert reminder in my last words; for the bold smile faded from her face, and she looked longer and more searchingly in mine than she had done as yet.

“You know Mrs. Evers exceedingly well,” Mrs. Lascelles remarked.

“I did years ago,” I guardedly replied.