Which was needless, for he had followed Barker to the door.  There he stood, a graceful, well-appointed, fashionable young man, with not a hair awry in his black curls, not a shadow on his handsome face, perfectly satisfied with himself and his fortunes—­a little flushed, perhaps, it might be, with what he would call the “pluckiness” of coming thus to “beard the lion in his den,” to visit the master of his late college.  All men have some good in them, and the good in this man was, that, if a scapegrace, he was not a weak villain, not a coward.

“How kind of you!  I am delighted to find a young gentleman so punctual in his engagements with an old woman,” said Miss Gascoigne, with mingled dignity and empressement. “Sir Edwin Uniacke, my sister, Miss Grey; Mrs. Grey, my sister-in-law.”

Certainly Aunt Henrietta’s “manners” were superb.

Arthur lay crying and coughing still, but his luckless condition before visitors was covered over by these beautiful manners, and by the flow of small-talk which at once began, and in which it was difficult to say who carried off the position best, the young man or the elderly woman.  Both deserved equal credit from that “world” to which they both belonged.

Presently a diversion was created by Christian’s rising to carry Arthur away.

“You need not go,” said Miss Gascoigne.  “Ring for Phillis.  The child has been ill, Sir Edwin, and Mrs. Grey has made herself a perfect slave to him.”

“How very—­ahem!—­charming!” said Sir Edwin Uniacke.

Phillis appeared, but Arthur clung tighter than ever to his step-mother’s neck.  Nor did she wish to release him.

“I thank you, no.  I can carry him quite easily,” she replied to Sir Edwin’s politely offered help, which was, indeed, the only sentence she had attempted to exchange with him.  With her boy in her arms she quitted the room, and did not return thither all the afternoon.

It was impossible she could.  Without any prudishness, without the slightest atom of self-distrust or fear to meet him, every womanly feeling in her kept her out of his way.  Here was a young man whom she had once ignorantly suffered to make love to her, nay, loved in a foolish, girlish way; a young man whom she now knew—­and he must know she knew it—­no virtuous girl could or ought to have regarded with a moment’s tenderness.  Here was he insulting her by coming to her own house—­her husband’s house, without the permission of either.  Had he been humble or shamefaced, she might have pitied him, for all pure hearts have such infinite pity for sinners.  She would have wished him repentance, peace, and prosperity, and gone on her way, as he on his, each feeling very kindly to the other, but meeting, and desiring to meet, no more.  Now, when he obtruded himself so unhesitatingly, so unblushingly, on the very scene of his misdoings and disgrace, pity was dried up in her heart, and indignation took its place.