She answered him at once, but in a voice that was quite toneless.  It seemed like that of a child repeating a lesson which it had learned by heart, and could be pronounced while it was thinking of something quite different.

“I was waiting till you came, my dear,” she said.  “Now I will lie down.  Come and sit by me, Michael.”

She watched him narrowly while she spoke, then gave a quick glance at her nurse, as if to see that they were not making signals to each other.  There was an easy chair just behind her head, and as Michael wheeled it up near her sofa, he looked at the nurse.  She moved her hand slightly towards the left, and interpreting this, he moved the chair a little to the left, so that he would not sit, as he had intended, quite close to the sofa.

“And you enjoyed your day in the country, mother?” asked Michael.

She looked at him sideways and slowly.  Then again, as if recollecting a task she had committed to memory, she answered.

“Yes, so much,” she said.  “All the trees and the birds and the sunshine.  I enjoyed them so much.”

She paused a moment.

“Bring your chair a little closer, my darling,” she said.  “You are so far off.  And why do you wait, nurse?  I will call you if I want you.”

Michael felt one moment of sickening spiritual terror.  He understood quite plainly why Nurse Baker did not want him to go near to his mother, and the reason of it gave him this pang, not of nervousness but of black horror, that the sane and the sensitive must always feel when they are brought intimately in contact with some blind derangement of instinct in those most nearly allied to them.  Physically, on the material plane, he had no fear at all.

He made a movement, grasping the arm of his chair, as if to wheel it closer, but he came actually no nearer her.

“Why don’t you go away, nurse?” said Lady Ashbridge, “and leave my son and me to talk about our nice day in the country?”

Nurse Baker answered quite naturally.

“I want to talk, too, my lady,” she said.  “I went with you and Lord Comber.  We all enjoyed it together.”

It seemed to Michael that his mother made some violent effort towards self-control.  He saw one of her hands that were lying on her knee clench itself, so that the knuckles stood out white.

“Yes, we will all talk together, then,” she said.  “Or—­er—­shall I have a little doze first?  I am rather sleepy with so much pleasant air.  And you are sleepy, too, are you not, Michael?  Yes, I see you look sleepy.  Shall we have a little nap, as I often do after tea?  Then, when I am fresh again, you shall come back, nurse, and we will talk over our pleasant day.”

When he entered the room, Michael had not quite closed the door, and now, as half an hour before, he heard steps on the stairs.  A moment afterwards his mother heard them too.

“What is that?” she said.  “Who is coming now to disturb me, just when I wanted to have a nap?”