He broke off, wiping his eyes, moist now with the pressure of his emotions, and while he was wiping them, Mrs. McKaye and her daughters exchanged frightened glances.  Elizabeth’s penchant for ill-timed humor disappeared; she stood, alert and awed, biting her lip.  Jane’s eyebrows went up in quick warning to her mother, who paled and flushed alternately.  The latter understood now why Andrew Daney had taken the precaution to warn her against the danger of conjugal confidences in the matter of Nan Brent; devoutly she wished she had had the common sense to have left those delicate negotiations entirely in the hands of dear, capable, faithful Andrew, for, delicate as they had been, she realized now, when it was too late, that in all probability Mr. Daney, although a mere man, would have concluded them without compromising the McKaye family.  Surely he would have had the good taste to assure Nan that he was acting entirely upon his own initiative.

On the instant, Mrs. McKaye hated the unfortunate general manager.  She told herself that, had he been possessed of the brains of a chipmunk, he would have pointed out to her the danger of her course; that he had not done so was proof that the craven had feared to compromise himself.  He had made a cat’s-paw of her, that’s what he had done!  He had taken advantage of a momentary lack of caution—­the result of her impetuous mother love.  Ah, what a blockhead the man was, not to have warned her of the diplomatic dangers she was risking!  At that moment, placid Nellie McKaye could have shrieked with fury; it would have been a relief to her if she could have stuck her hatpin in that monumental chucklehead, Daney.  Like so many of her sex, the good lady’s code of sportsmanship was a curious one, to say the least.  It had not been prudence but an instinctive desire to protect her son that had moved her to be careful when begging Nan to return to Port Agnew, to indicate that this request predicated no retirement from the resolute stand which the family had taken against the latter’s alliance with Donald.  In a hazy, indefinite way, she had realized the importance of nullifying any tendency on her part to compromise herself or her family by the mere act of telephoning to Nan, and with the unintentional brutality of a not very intelligent, tactless woman she had taken this means of protection.

Curiously enough, it had not occurred to her until this moment that she had done something shameful and cruel and stupid and unwomanly.  She shriveled mentally in the contemplation of it.  Not until her husband had so unexpectedly revealed to her a hitherto hidden facet of his character—­his masculine code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—­did she realize how dreadfully she had blundered.  She realized now that, without having given the slightest thought to the commission of an act unworthy of her womanhood, she had acted because, to her, the end appeared to justify the means; never given to self-analysis, she had merely followed the imperative call of her mother love to the point where nothing mattered save results.