Suddenly there burst in upon her the countess-dowager:  that estimable lady’s bonnet awry, her face scarlet, herself in a commotion.

“I didn’t suppose you’d have done it, Maude!  You might play tricks upon other people, I think, but not upon your own mother.”

The interlude was rather welcome to Maude, rousing her from her apathy.  Not for some few moments, however, could she understand the cause of complaint.

It appeared that the countess-dowager, with that absence of all sense of the fitness of things which so eminently characterized her, had joined the Ashtons after service, inquiring with quite motherly solicitude after Mrs. Ashton’s health, complimenting Anne upon her charming looks; making herself, in short, as agreeable as she knew how, and completely ignoring the past in regard to her son-in-law.  Gentlewomen in mind and manners, they did not repulse her, were even courteously civil; and she graciously accompanied them across the road to the Rectory-gate, and there took a cordial leave, saying she would look in on the morrow.

In returning she met Dr. Ashton.  He was passing her with nothing but a bow; but he little knew the countess-dowager.  She grasped his hand; said how grieved she was not to have had an opportunity of explaining away her part in the past; hoped he would let bygones be bygones; and finally, whilst the clergyman was scheming how to get away from her without absolute rudeness, she astonished him with a communication touching the action-at-law.  There ensued a little mutual misapprehension, followed by a few emphatic words of denial from Dr. Ashton; and the countess-dowager walked away with a scarlet face, and an explosion of anger against her daughter.

Lady Hartledon was not yet callous to the proprieties of life; and the intrusion on the Ashtons, which her mother confessed to, half frightened, half shamed her.  But the dowager’s wrath at having been misled bore down everything.  Dr. Ashton had entered no action whatever against Lord Hartledon; had never thought of doing it.

“And you, you wicked, ungrateful girl, to come home to me with such an invention, and cause me to start off on a fool’s errand!  Do you suppose I should have gone and humbled myself to those people, but for hoping to bring the parson to a sense of what he was doing in going-in for those enormous damages?”

“I have not come home to you with any invention, mamma.  Dr. Ashton has entered the action.”

“He has not,” raved the dowager.  “It is an infamous hoax you have played off upon me.  You couldn’t find any excuse for your husband’s staying in London, and so invented this.  What with you, and what with Kirton’s ingratitude, I shall be driven out of house and home!”

“I won’t say another word until you are calm and can talk common sense,” said Maude, leaning back in her chair, and putting down her prayer-book.

“Common sense!  What am I talking but common sense?  When a child begins to mislead her own mother, the world ought to come to an end.”