“But aren’t you going to try one of the new ones?” asked Mrs. Maldon, amiably but uncertainly.

“No,” said he, with cold nonchalance.  Upon nobody in the world had the sweet magic of Mrs. Maldon’s demeanour less influence than upon himself.  “Not now.  I want to enjoy my smoke, and the first smoke out of a new pipe is never any good.”

It was very true, but far more wanton than true.  Mrs. Maldon in her ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its wantonness.  She was wounded—­silly, touchy old thing!  She was wounded, and she hid the wound.

Rachel flushed with ire against the boor.

“By the way,” Mrs. Maldon remarked in a light, indifferent tone, just as though the glory of the moment had not been suddenly rent and shrivelled.  “I didn’t see your portmanteau in the back room just now, Julian.  Has any one carried it upstairs?  I didn’t hear any one go upstairs.”

“I didn’t bring one, aunt,” said Julian.

“Not bring—­”

“I was forgetting to tell ye.  I can’t sleep here to-night.  I’m off to South Africa to-morrow, and I’ve got a lot of things to fix up at my digs to-night.”  He lit the old pipe from a match which Louis passed to him.

“To South Africa?” murmured Mrs. Maldon, aghast.  And she repeated, “South Africa?” To her it was an incredible distance.  It was not a place—­it was something on the map.  Perhaps she had never imaginatively realized that actual people did in fact go to South Africa.  “But this is the first I have heard of this!” she said.  Julian’s extraordinary secretiveness always disturbed her.

“I only got the telegram about my berth this morning,” said Julian, rather sullenly on the defensive.

“Is it business?” Mrs. Maldon asked.

“You may depend it isn’t pleasure, aunt,” he answered, and shut his lips tight on the pipe.

After a pause Mrs. Maldon tried again.

“Where do you sail from?”

Julian answered—­

“Southampton.”

There was another pause.  Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of sympathetic dismay at the situation.

Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.

“Of course if you can’t sleep here, you can’t,” said she benignly.  “I can see that.  But we were quite counting on having a man in the house to-night—­with all these burglars about—­weren’t we, Rachel?” Her grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.

Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile—­

“We were, indeed!”

But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the brute Julian.

“Well, there it is!” Julian gruffly and callously summed up the situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.

“Propitious moment for getting a monopoly of door-knobs at the Cape, I suppose?” said Louis quizzically.  His cousin manufactured, among other articles, white and jet door-knobs.