Tatham and his mother were walking through the park together.  He was in riding-dress, and his horse awaited him at the Keswick gate.  Lady Tatham beside him was attired as usual in the plainest and oldest of clothes.  Her new gowns, which she ordered from time to time mechanically, leaving the whole designing of them to her dress-maker, served her at Duddon, in her own phrase, mainly “for my maid to show the housekeeper.”  They lay in scented drawers, daintily folded in tissue paper, and a maid no less ambitious than her fellows for a well-dressed mistress kept mournful watch over them.  This carelessness of dress had grown upon Victoria Tatham with years.  In her youth the indulgence of a taste for beautiful and artistic clothes had taken up a great deal of her time.  Then suddenly it had all become indifferent to her.  Devotion to her boy, books, and natural history absorbed a mind more and more impatient of ordinary conventions.

“You are quite sure that Melrose will be out of the way?” she asked her son as they entered on the last stretch of their walk.

“Well, you saw the letter.”

“No—­give it me.”

He handed it.  She read it through attentively.

“Mr. Melrose asks me to say that he will not be here.  He is going over to the neighbourhood of Carlisle on business, and cannot be home till ten o’clock at night.”

“He has the decency not to ‘regret,’” said Lady Tatham.

“No.  It is awkward of course going at all”—­Tatham’s brow was a little furrowed—­“but I somehow think I ought to go.”

“Oh, go,” said his mother.  “If he does play a trick you will know how to meet it.  It would be very like him to play some trick,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Mother,” said Tatham impetuously, “was Melrose ever in love with you?”

He coloured boyishly as he spoke.  Lady Tatham looked up startled; a faint red appeared in her cheeks also.

“I believe he supposed himself to be.  I knew him very well, and I might—­possibly—­have accepted him—­but that some information came to my knowledge.  Then, later on, largely I think to punish me, he nearly succeeded in entangling my younger sister—­your Aunt Edith.  I stood in his way.  He hates me, of course.  I think he suffered.  In those days he was very different.  But his pride and self-will were always a madness.  And gradually they have devoured everything else.”  She paused.  “I cannot tell you anything more, Harry.  There were other people concerned.”

“Dearest, as if I should ask!  He did my mother no injury?”

Under the shadow of the woods the young man threw his arm round her shoulders, looking down upon her with a proud tenderness.

“None.  I escaped; and I won all along the line.  I was neither to be pitied—­nor he,” she added slowly, “though I daresay he would put down his later mode of life to me.”

“As if any woman could ever have put up with him!”