“’If she be not fair for me—­
     What care I—­’”

“Henry!” and his wife, beside herself, tried to stop his mouth with her hand.

“All right, I won’t finish,” said the doctor, placidly, disengaging himself.  “But let me assure you, Patricia, whether you like it or not, that that is a male sentiment.  I quite agree that no nice woman could have written it.  But, then, Hugh is not a nice woman—­nor am I.”

“I thought you were so fond of her!” said his wife, reproachfully.

“Miss Mallory?  I adore her.  But, to tell the truth, Patricia, I want a daughter-in-law—­and—­and grand-children,” added the doctor, deliberately, stretching out his long limbs to the fire.  “I admit that my remarks may be quite irrelevant and ridiculous—­but I repeat that—­in spite of everything—­Hugh enjoyed his walk.”

* * * * *

One October evening, a week later, Lady Lucy sat waiting for Sir James Chide at Tallyn Hall.  Sir James had invited himself to dine and sleep, and Lady Lucy was expecting him in the up-stairs sitting-room, a medley of French clocks and china figures, where she generally sat now, in order to be within quick and easy reach of Oliver.

She was reading, or pretending to read, by the fire, listening all the time for the sound of the carriage outside.  Meanwhile, the silence of the immense house oppressed her.  It was broken only by the chiming of a carillon clock in the hall below.  The little tune it played, fatuously gay, teased her more insistently each time she heard it.  It must really be removed.  She wondered Oliver had not already complained of it.

A number of household and estate worries oppressed her thoughts.  How was she to cope with them?  Capable as she was, “John” had always been there to advise her, in emergency—­or Oliver.  She suspected the house-steward of dishonesty.  And the agent of the estate had brought her that morning complaints of the head gamekeeper that were most disquieting.  What did they want with gamekeepers now?  Who would ever shoot at Tallyn again?  With impatience she felt herself entangled in the endless machinery of wealth and the pleasures of wealth, so easy to set in motion, and so difficult to stop, even when all the savor has gone out of it.  She was a tired, broken woman, with an invalid son; and the management of her great property, in which her capacities and abilities had taken for so long an imperious and instinctive delight, had become a mere burden.  She longed to creep into some quiet place, alone with Oliver, out of reach of this army of servants and dependents, these impassive and unresponsive faces.

The crunching of the carriage wheels on the gravel outside gave her a start of something like pleasure.  Among the old friends there was no one now she cared so much to see as Sir James Chide.  Sir James had lately left Parliament and politics, and had taken a judgeship.  She understood that he had lost interest in politics after and in consequence of John Ferrier’s death; and she knew, of course, that he had refused the Attorney-Generalship, on the ground of the treatment meted out to his old friend and chief.  During the month of Oliver’s second election, moreover, she had been very conscious of Sir James’s hostility to her son.  Intercourse between him and Tallyn had practically ceased.