These good hours were too rare in their appearances and swift in their vanishings to warrant the certainty that she would feel the same this afternoon, and Michael tried to turn the subject.

“Ah, we shall have to think about that, mother,” he said.  “Look, there is a quarrel going on between those two sparrows.  They both want the same straw.”

She followed his pointing finger, easily diverted.

“Oh, I wish they would not quarrel,” she said.  “It is so sad and stupid to quarrel, instead of being agreeable and pleasant.  I do not like them to do that.  There, one has flown away!  And see, the crocuses are coming up.  Indeed it is spring.  I should like to see the country to-day.  If you are not busy, Michael, would you take me out into the country?  We might go to Richmond Park perhaps, for that is in the opposite direction from Ashbridge, and look at the deer and the budding trees.  Oh, Michael, might we take lunch with us, and eat it out of doors?  I want to enjoy as much as I can of this spring day.”

She clung closer to Michael.

“Everything seems so fragile, dear,” she whispered.  “Everything may break. . . .  Sometimes I am frightened.”

The little expedition was soon moving, after a slight altercation between Lady Ashbridge and her nurse, whom she wished to leave behind in order to enjoy Michael’s undiluted society.  But Miss Baker, who had already spoken to Michael, telling him she was not quite happy in her mind about her patient, was firm about accompanying them, though she obligingly effaced herself as far as possible by taking the box-seat by the chauffeur as they drove down, and when they arrived, and Michael and his mother strolled about in the warm sunshine before lunch, keeping carefully in the background, just ready to come if she was wanted.  But indeed it seemed as if no such precautions were necessary, for never had Lady Ashbridge been more amenable, more blissfully content in her son’s companionship.  The vernal hour, that first smell of the rejuvenated earth, as it stirred and awoke from its winter sleep had reached her no less than it had reached the springing grass and the heart of buried bulbs, and never perhaps in all her life had she been happier than on that balmy morning of early March.  Here the stir of spring that had crept across miles of smoky houses to the gardens behind Curzon Street, was more actively effervescent, and the “bare, leafless choirs” of the trees, which had been empty of song all winter, were once more resonant with feathered worshippers.  Through the tussocks of the grey grass of last year were pricking the vivid shoots of green, and over the grove of young birches and hazel the dim, purple veil of spring hung mistlike.  Down by the water-edge of the Penn ponds they strayed, where moor-hens scuttled out of rhododendron bushes that overhung the lake, and hurried across the surface of the water, half swimming, half flying, for the shelter of some securer retreat.