“I have no appetite.”

“Have you left off taking breakfast?”

“To a great extent.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

Lord Hartledon slightly raised his eyebrows.  “One can’t eat much in the heat of summer.”

“Heat of summer! it’s nothing more than autumn now.  And you are as thin as a weasel.  Try some of that excellent raised pie.”

“Pray let my appetite alone, Lady Kirton.  If I wanted anything I should take it.”

“Let you alone! yes, of course!  You don’t want it noticed that you are out of sorts,” snapped the dowager.  “Oh, I know the signs.  You’ve been raking about London—­that’s what you’ve been at.”

The “raking about London” presented so complete a contrast to the lonely life he had really passed, that Hartledon smiled in very bitterness.  And the smile incensed the dowager, for she misunderstood it.

“It’s early days to begin!  I don’t think you ought to have married Maude.”

“I don’t think I ought.”

She did not expect the rejoinder, and dropped her knife and fork.  “Why did you marry her?”

“Perhaps you can tell that better than I.”

The countess-dowager pushed up her hair.

“Are you going to throw off the mask outright, and become a bad husband as well as a neglectful one?”

Val rose from his seat and went to the window, which opened to the ground.  He did not wish to quarrel with her if he could help it.  Lady Kirton raised her voice.

“Staying away, as you have, in London, and leaving Maude here to pine alone.”

“Business kept me in London.”

“I dare say it did!” cried the wrathful dowager.  “If Maude died of ennui, you wouldn’t care.  She can’t go about much herself just now, poor thing!  I do wish Edward had lived.”

“I wish he had, with all my heart!” came the answer; and the tone struck surprise on the dowager’s ear—­it was so full of pain.  “Maude’s coming to Hartledon without me was her own doing,” he remarked.  “I wished her not to come.”

“I dare say you did, as her heart was set upon it.  The fact of her wishing to do a thing would be the signal for your opposing it; I’ve gathered that much.  My advice to Maude is, to assert her own will, irrespective of yours.”

“Don’t you think, Lady Kirton, that it may be as well if you let me and my wife alone?  We shall get along, no doubt, without interference; with interference we might not do so.”

What with one thing and another, the dowager’s temper was inflammable that morning; and when it reached that undesirable state she was apt to say pretty free things, even for her.

“Edward would have made her the better husband.”

“But she didn’t like him, you know!” he returned, his eyes flashing with the remembrance of an old thought; and the countess-dowager took the sentence literally, and not ironically.