Rose got up from the stool and rested one hand on the marble mantelpiece.  She needed some help, some physical support.

“Edmund,” she said, “I don’t think I dwell much on the future; I leave all in God’s hands.  I have been through a good deal now, you must not expect too much of me.”  She paused.  “But what you have said to me about yourself is nonsense; I wish you would not talk like that.  You are only forty.  You are very clever, very rich, you have the right sort of ambition although you won’t say so, and you are, oh! so kind.  Couldn’t you do something, have some real interest?” He growled inarticulately.  “Is it of no use to ask you just to think it over?”

“None whatever,” he said firmly and cheerfully.

The gong sounded in the hall for luncheon.

BOOK II

CHAPTER XIV

MOLLY IN THE SEASON

“Still together?”

“Yes; and it has not turned out so badly as might be expected.”

“I thought you were to have had a flat with a dear old governess?”

“I could not get Miss Carew, the governess in question, and Adela Delaport Green pressed me to stay with her for the season.”

“It does credit to the amiability of both,” said Edmund.

“I don’t know about that,” answered Molly, “we both knew what we wanted, and that we could not easily get it unless we combined, and so we combined.”

“But was it quite easy to get over the slight friction at Groombridge?”

“Oh, yes; directly we got away Adela was all right.  She felt stifled by the atmosphere, and she recovered as soon as she got home.”

Edmund would have been less surprised at the tone of this last remark if he had seen Lady Groombridge’s exceedingly offhand way of greeting Molly this same evening.  That great lady, having expected to find that Molly had, acting on her advice, abandoned Mrs. Delaport Green, was quite disappointed in the girl when she met them still together in London, and so she extended her frigidity to both of them.

“And you are enjoying yourself?” Edmund went on.  “Come, let us sit behind those palms.  You look as if things were going smoothly.”

“It is delightful.”

Molly cast her grey eyes over the moving groups that were strolling about the ballroom, and over the lights and flowers and the band preparing to begin again, and then looked up into Edmund’s face.  It was a slow, luxurious movement, fitted to the rather unusually developed face and expression.  Most debutantes are crude in their enjoyment, but Molly was beginning London at twenty-one, not at eighteen, and circumstances made her more mature than her actual experience of society warranted.  Yet it seemed to Edmund that the untamed element in her was the more striking from the contrast.  Molly accepted social delights and social conventions as a young and gentle tigress might enjoy the soft turf of an English lawn.