A little silence fell; then, very gently, very tenderly the old woman spoke: 

“So you see, dear, until she is of age it will be only my duty to see that Damaris does not marry your son.”

And Jill sprang to her feet and beat her hands together.

“And I,” she said, “I will give my heart’s blood to bring happiness to
my son.   Death alone shall------”

She stopped and shivered as she glanced over her shoulder out into the night, then drew herself up with a surpassing dignity and threw out her hands in the Eastern gesture of resignation.

“You say ‘I will not,’ I say ‘I will,’ but it is God who decides.”  With a little sobbing sigh she relinquished the unequal struggle, just as Hobson walked boldly into the room and stood inside the door, like a graven image of intense displeasure, when her mistress, unable to withstand the unspoken disapproval, consented, after a promise to Jill to have another long talk on the morrow, to go to bed.

But there was to be no long talk anyway in the town of Khargegh on the morrow.

She lay in bed, propped by pillows against which, divested of its mask of red and white and blue, the dear little old face shone brown.  A priceless bit of lace hid her own white locks, free for the night of the outrageous perruque which covered them by day and which lay at the moment hidden in its box.

A pair of crimson bed-slippers peeped from under the bed, another pair, absurdly small, outrageously high-heeled, buckled and crimson, made a splash of colour near the dressing-table.  Her little hands were gently folded under the ruffles of priceless lace of her cashmere night-attire as she lay quite still, trying to find a way out through the jungle of pain and grief which seemed to spread round and about so many she loved; whilst Dekko, puffed out with sleepiness, sat on the back of a chair, muttering incoherently to some fanciful image of his weird brain.

Hobson lay fast asleep in the next room, which had a communicating door with that of her mistress.  Knowing nothing of nerves or of temperament, she had dropped asleep as soon as her head, with scanty locks tortured into a chevaux-de-frise of steel pins, had touched the pillow; her strong hands were clenched on the frill of her stout calico nightdress; her powerful face looked grim in the dim light of the moon, which, high in the heavens, flung a silver shaft through the open window straight across the bed.  There was absolutely no sound when, just as, so many miles away, Damaris made her passionate appeal, as she stood by the window, Hobson, dour, stolid, unimaginative, yet with a streak of Scotch blood in her veins, sat straight up in bed.  Her eyes were wide open as she stared in front of her, then she passed her powerful hand over her grim face and flung the bedclothes to one side.

“She’s in trouble.”  She spoke very clearly, sat for a moment thinking, then reached for a puce dressing-gown trimmed mulberry.  “I’ll go and tell her,” and the infinite love in the pronoun was good to hear.  “She’ll understand.”