“She’s dead, you know,” broke in Peter hastily, lest Urquhart should make a mistake embarrassing to himself.  “A long time ago,” he added, again anxious to save embarrassment.

“Yes—­oh yes.”  Urquhart, from his manner, might or might not have known.

“I live with my uncle,” Peter further told him, thus delicately and unobstrusively supplying the information that Mr. Margerison too was dead.  He omitted to mention the date of this bereavement, having always a delicate sense of what did and did not concern his hearers.  The decease of the lady who had for a brief period been Lady Hugh Urquhart, might be supposed to be of a certain interest to her stepson; that of her second husband was a private family affair of the Margerisons.

(The Urquhart-Margerison connection, which may possibly appear complicated, was really very simple, and also of exceedingly little importance to anyone but Peter; but in case anyone feels a desire to have these things elucidated, it may here be mentioned that Peter’s mother had made two marriages, the first being with Urquhart’s father, Urquhart being already in existence at the time; the second with Mr. Margerison, a clergyman, who was also already father of one son, and became Peter’s father later.  Put so, it sounds a little difficult, chiefly because they were all married so frequently and so rapidly, but really is simplicity itself.)

“I live with my uncle too,” Urquhart said, and the fact formed a shadowy bond.  But Peter’s tone had struck a note of flatness that faintly indicated a lack of enthusiasm as to the menage.  This note was, to Peter’s delicately attuned ears, absent from Urquhart’s voice.  Peter wondered if Lord Hugh’s brother (supposing it to be a paternal uncle) resembled Lord Hugh.  To resemble Lord Hugh, Peter had always understood (till three years ago, when his mother had fallen into silence on that and all other topics) was to be of a charm....  One spoke of it with a faint sigh.  And yet of a charm that somehow had lacked something, the intuitive Peter had divined; perhaps it had been too splendid, too fortunate, for a lady who had loved all small, weak, unlucky things.  Anyhow, not long after Lord Hugh’s death (he was killed out hunting) she had married Mr. Margerison, the poorest clergyman she could find, and the most devoted to the tending of the unprosperous.

Peter remembered her—­compassionate, delicate, lovely, full of laughter, with something in the dance of her vivid dark-blue eyes that hinted at radiant and sad memories.  She had loved Lord Hugh for a glorious and brief space of time.  The love had perhaps descended, a hereditary bequest, with the deep blue eyes, to her son.  Peter would have understood the love; the thing he would not have understood was the feeling that had flung her on the tide of reaction at Mr. Margerison’s feet.  Mr. Margerison was a hard liver and a tremendous giver.  Both these things had come to mean a great deal to Sylvia Urquhart—­much more than they had meant to the girl Sylvia Hope.