He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.

“Do you call that a kiss?”

“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered, and was gone.

As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too.  She felt calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than ever before in her life.  She thought of all the things she ought to have said to Pete.  The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she was one with him.  She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was, or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother—­it seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.

Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.

“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.

She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table.  Pringle, as he bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.  Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her stepfather’s return.

“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”

“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”

Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law.  He found his daughter writing letters in her room.  He thought her looking cross, but in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind, overstrained.

“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his question.  “He ought to be.  He is in charge of two lovely young creatures hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the household.”

“You’ve seen him, of course.”

“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes.  They communicate by secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”

Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as if it were logic itself.  He changed the subject and said boldly: 

“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”

Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.

“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured.  “Just at the most inconvenient time—­inconvenient for me, I mean.  Really, lovers are the only people you can depend on.  I wish I had a lover.”

“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should not say such a thing.  If Mathilde heard you—­”

“Mathilde is the person who made me see it.  Her boy is here all the time, trying to think of something to please her.  And who have I?  Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady.  I can’t help wishing I had a lover.  They are the only people who, as the Wayne boy would say, ‘stick around.’  But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal nature.”  She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse—­the same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital—­put in her head and said brightly: