“I thought you would have been home an hour ago.”

“I know.  I want to tell you about it.  Mama, how lovely you look in that blue thing!  Won’t you come up-stairs with me while I undress?”

Adelaide shook her head.

“Not to-night,” she answered.

“You are angry with me,” the girl went on.  “But if you will come, I will explain.  I have something to tell you, Mama.”

Mrs. Farron’s heart stood still.  The phrase could mean only one thing.  She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself began to undo the soft, pink silk.

“It needs an extra hook,” she murmured.  “I told her it did.”

Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been able to see the middle of her back.

“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.

“It perfectly well might.”

Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair.  In her short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have been a child.

The silence began to grow awkward.  Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column.  A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her.  She pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.

“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”

“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”

“Why not to him?”

“I know nothing about him.”

“I don’t know very much myself.  Yes, it’s Pete Wayne.  Pierson his name is, but every one calls him Pete.  How strange it was that I did not even know his first name when you asked me!”

A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression:  Vincent had known, Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed.  She did not know what to say.  She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has been aggrieved.  She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman.  Of course in all probability the thing would be better stopped.  But could this be accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and yet commit herself to nothing?

She raised her eyes.

“I do not approve of youthful marriages,” she said.

“O Mama!  And you were only eighteen yourself.”

“That is why.”