She greeted Meadows rather absently.

“Rachel didn’t carry you off?  Oh, then—­I wonder if I may ask you something?”

Meadows assured her she might ask him anything.

“I wonder if you will save yourself for a walk with Lord Dunstable.  Will you ask him?  He’s very low, and you would cheer him up.”

Meadows looked at her interrogatively.  He too had noticed that Lord Dunstable had seemed for some days to be out of spirits.

“Why do people have sons!” said Miss Field, briskly.

Meadows understood the reference.  It was common knowledge among the Dunstables’ friends that their son was anything but a comfort to them.

“Anything particularly wrong?” he asked her in a lowered voice, as they neared the house.  At the same time, he could not help wondering whether, under all circumstances—­if her nearest and dearest were made mincemeat in a railway accident, or crushed by an earth-quake—­this fair-haired, rosy-cheeked lady would still keep her perennial smile.  He had never yet seen her without it.

Miss Field replied in a joking tone that Lord Dunstable was depressed because the graceless Herbert had promised his parents a visit—­a whole week—­in August, and had now cried off on some excuse or other.  Meadows inquired if Lady Dunstable minded as much as her husband.

“Quite!” laughed Miss Field.  “It is not so much that she wants to see Herbert as that she’s found someone to marry him to.  You’ll see the lady this afternoon.  She comes with the Duke’s party, to be looked at.”

“But I understand that the young man is by no means manageable?”

Miss Field’s amusement increased.

“That’s Rachel’s delusion.  She knows very well that she hasn’t been able to manage him so far; but she’s always full of fresh schemes for managing him.  She thinks, if she could once marry him to the right wife, she and the wife between them could get the whip hand of him.”

“Does she care for him?” said Meadows, bluntly.

Miss Field considered the question, and for the first time Meadows perceived a grain of seriousness in her expression.  But she emerged from her meditations, smiling as usual.

“She’d be hard hit if anything very bad happened!”

“What could happen?”

“Well, of course they never know whether he won’t marry to please himself—­produce somebody impossible!”

“And Lady Dunstable would suffer?”

Miss Field chuckled.

“I really believe you think her a kind of griffin—­a stony creature with a hole where her heart ought to be.  Most of her friends do.  Rachel, of course, goes through life assuming that none of the disagreeable things that happen to other people will ever happen to her.  But if they ever did happen—­”

“The very stones would cry out?  But hasn’t she lost all influence with the youth?”

“She won’t believe it.  She’s always scheming for him.  And when he’s not here she feels so affectionate and so good!  And directly he comes—­”