Lady Anningford adored her offspring, and was only too pleased to show them; but she said: 

“Oh, wait a moment, Hector, until some of these people have gone.  Lady Harrowfield hates children, and Fordy made some terrible remarks about her wig last time.”

“I wish he would do it again,” said Hector.  “She took the skin off every one the whole way through lunch.”

“But Colonel Lowerby told me she was one of the cleverest women in London!” exclaimed Theodora; “and surely it is not very clever just to be bitter and spiteful!”

“Yes, she is clever,” said Anne, with a peculiar smile, “and we are all rather under her thumb.”

“It is perfectly ridiculous how you pander to her!” Hector said, impatiently.  “I should never allow my wife to have anything but a distant acquaintance with her if I were married,” and he glanced at Theodora.

Lady Anningford’s duties as hostess took her away from them then, and he sat down on the sofa in her place.

“Oh, how I hate all this!” he said.  “How different it is to Paris!  It grates and jars and brings out the worst in one.  These odious women and their little, narrow ways!  You will never stay much in London—­will you, Theodora?”

“I have always to do what Josiah wishes, you know; he rather likes it, and means us to come back after Whitsuntide, I think.”

Hector seemed to have lost the power of looking ahead.  Whitsuntide, and to be with her in the country for that time, appeared to him the boundary of his outlook.

What would happen after Whitsuntide?  Who could say?

He longed to tell her how his thoughts were forever going back to the day at Versailles, and the peace and beauty of those woods—­how all seemed here as though something were dragging him down to the commonplace, away out of their exalted dream, to a dull earth.  But he dared not—­he must keep to subjects less moving.  So there was silence for some moments.

Theodora, since coming to London, had begun to understand it was possible for beautiful Englishmen to be husbands now and then, and that the term is not necessarily synonymous with “bore” and “duty”—­as she had always thought it from her meagre experience.

She could not help picturing what a position of exquisite happiness some nice girl might have—­some day—­as Hector’s wife.  And she looked out of the window, and her eyes were sad.  While the vision which floated to him at the same moment was of her at his side at Bracondale, and the delicious joy of possessing for their own some gay and merry babies like Fordy and his little brother and sister.  And each saw a wistful longing in the other’s eyes, and they talked quickly of banal things.

XXII

The Crow stayed on after all the other guests had left.  He knew his hostess wished to talk to him.

It had begun to pour with rain, and the dripping streets held out no inducement to them to go out.