It was on a Monday.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson was seen to come down to breakfast in an unusually cheerful frame of mind.  Tyson was away; he had been up in town for three weeks, and was expected home that evening.  She looked for letters.  There were two—­one from the master of the house; one also from Stanistreet, placed undermost by the discreet Pinker.  The same thoughtful observer of character noticed that his mistress blushed and put her letters aside instead of reading them at once.  At ten Swinny came into the breakfast-room, bearing Baby.  This was the custom of the house.  By courtesy the most unnatural mother may be credited with a wish to see her child once a day.

This morning Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not so much as raise her head.  She was sitting by the fire in her usual drooping guilty attitude.  Swinny noticed that the hearth was strewn with the fragments of torn letters.  She put the baby down on a rug by the window, and left his mother alone with him to see what she would do.

She did nothing.  Baby lay on the floor sucking his little claw-like fingers, and stirring feebly in the sun.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson continued to gaze abstractedly at nothing.  When Swinny came back after a judicious interval, he was still lying there, and she still sitting as before.  She had not moved an inch.  How did Swinny know that?  Why, the tail of Mrs. Tyson’s dress was touching the exact spot on the carpet it had touched before. (Swinny had made a note of the pattern.) And the child might have cried himself into fits before she’d have stirred hand or foot to comfort him.  Baby found himself caught up in a rapture and strained to his faithful Swinny’s breast.  Whereupon he cried.  He had been happier lying in the sun.

Swinny turned round to the motionless figure by the hearth, and held the child well up in her arms.

“Baby thinks that his mamma would like to see him,” said Swinny, in an insinuating manner.

A hard melancholy voice answered, “I don’t want to see him.  I don’t want to see him any more.”

All the same Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned and looked after him as he was carried through the doorway.  She could just see the downy back of his innocent head, and his ridiculous frock bulging roundly over the nurse’s arm.  But whether she was thinking of him at that moment God only knows.

The household was informed that its master would not return that evening after all; that no date was fixed for his coming.

Later on Pinker, the guardian of the hearth, finding those fragments of letters tried to put them together again.  Tyson’s letter it was impossible to restore.  It had been torn to atoms in a vicious fury of destruction.  But by great good luck Stanistreet’s (a mere note) had been more tenderly dealt with.  It was torn in four neat pieces; the text, though corrupt, was fairly legible, and left little to the ingenuity of the scholiast.  The Captain was staying in the neighborhood.  He proposed to call on Mrs. Nevill Tyson.  Would she be at home on Wednesday afternoon?  Now, to Pinker’s certain knowledge, Mrs. Nevill Tyson had taken the letters to the post herself that morning.  That meant secrecy, and secrecy meant mischief.