The rarity of a complaint from Sylvia moved her mother strangely.  There was a forlornness, moreover, in her appealing attitude.  Just for a moment Mrs. Thesiger began to think of early days of which the memory was at once a pain and a reproach.  A certain little village underneath the great White Horse on the Dorsetshire Downs rose with a disturbing vividness before her eyes.  She almost heard the mill stream babble by.  In that village of Sutton Poyntz she had herself been born, and to it she had returned, caught back again for a little while by her own country and her youth, that Sylvia might be born there too.  These months had made a kind of green oasis in her life.  She had rested there in a farm-house, after a time of much turbulence, with the music of running water night and day in her ears, a high-walled garden of flowers and grass about her, and the downs with the shadow-filled hollows, and brown treeless slopes rising up from her very feet.  She could not but think of that short time of peace, and her voice softened as she answered her daughter.

“We don’t keep step, Sylvia,” she said, with an uneasy laugh.  “I know that.  But, after all, would you be happier with your father, even if he wants to keep you!  You have all you want here—­frocks, amusement, companions.  Try to be more friendly with people.”

But Sylvia merely shook her head.

“I can’t go on any longer like this,” she said, slowly.  “I can’t, mother.  If my father won’t have me, I must see what I can do.  Of course, I can’t do much.  I don’t know anything.  But I am too unhappy here.  I cannot endure the life we are living without a home or—­respect,—­” Sylvia had not meant to use that word.  But it had slipped out before she was aware.  She broke off and turned her eyes again to her mother.  They were very bright, for the moonlight glistened upon tears.  But the softness had gone from her mother’s face.  She had grown in a moment hard, and her voice rang hard as she asked: 

“Why do you think that your father and I parted?  Come, let me hear!”

Sylvia turned her head away.

“I don’t think about it,” she said, gently.  “I don’t want to think about it.  I just think that he left you, because you did not keep step either.”

“Oh, he left me?  Not I him?  Then why does he write to me?”

The voice was growing harder with every word.

“I suppose because he is kind”; and at that simple explanation Sylvia’s mother laughed with a bitter amusement.  Sylvia sat scraping the gravel with her slipper.

“Don’t do that!” cried her mother, irritably.  Then she asked suddenly a question which startled her daughter.

“Did you meet any one last night on the mountain, at the inn?”

Sylvia’s face colored, but the moonlight hid the change.

“Yes,” she said.

“A man?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“A Captain Chayne.  He was at the hotel all last week.  It was his friend who was killed on the Glacier des Nantillons.”