He left immediately after this to ascertain Lady Ashbridge’s feelings about it, and walked home with a complete resumption of his usual exuberance.  It indeed seemed an admirable plan.  It relieved him from the nightmare of his wife’s continual presence, and this he expressed to himself by thinking that it relieved her from his.  It was not that he was deficient in sympathy for her, for in his self-centred way he was fond of her, but he could sympathise with her just as well at Ashbridge.  He could do no good to her, and he had not for her that instinct of love which would make it impossible for him to leave her.  He would also be spared the constant irritation of having Michael in the house, and this he expressed to himself by saying that Michael disliked him, and would be far more at his ease without him.  Furthermore, Michael would be able to continue his studies . . . of this too, in spite of the fact that he had always done his best to discourage them, he made a self-laudatory translation, by telling himself that he was very glad not to have to cause Michael to discontinue them.  In fine, he persuaded himself, without any difficulty, that he was a very fine fellow in consenting to a plan that suited him so admirably, and only wondered that he had not thought of it himself.  There was nothing, after his wife had expressed her joyful acceptance of it, to detain him in town, and he left for Ashbridge that afternoon, while Michael moved into the house in Curzon Street.

Michael entered upon his new life without the smallest sense of having done anything exceptional or even creditable.  It was so perfectly obvious to him that he had to be with his mother that he had no inclination to regard himself at all in the matter; the thing was as simple as it had been to him to help Francis out of financial difficulties with a gift of money.  There was no effort of will, no sense of sacrifice about it, it was merely the assertion of a paramount instinct.  The life limited his freedom, for, for a great part of the day he was with his mother, and between his music and his attendance on her, he had but little leisure.  Occasionally he went out to see his friends, but any prolonged absence on his part always made her uneasy, and he would often find her, on his return, sitting in the hall, waiting for him, so as to enjoy his presence from the first moment that he re-entered the house.  But though he found no food for reflection in himself, Aunt Barbara, who came to see them some few days after Michael had been installed here, found a good deal.

They had all had tea together, and afterwards Lady Ashbridge’s nurse had come down to fetch her upstairs to rest.  And then Aunt Barbara surprised Michael, for she came across the room to him, with her kind eyes full of tears, and kissed him.

“My dear, I must say it once,” she said, “and then you will know that it is always in my mind.  You have behaved nobly, Michael; it’s a big word, but I know no other.  As for your father—­”