She returned from the visit in the most extraordinary condition.  Her face was red, she panted for breath, there were dark circles round her eyes.

“The impudence!” she shouted.  “The cursed impudence!  Oh, I’m swearing.  I don’t care.  That beastly woman—­how dare she interfere—­I’ll—­Philip, dear, I’m sorry.  It’s no good.  You must go.”

“Go where?  Do sit down.  What’s happened?” This outburst of violence from his elegant ladylike mother pained him dreadfully.  He had not known that it was in her.

“She won’t accept—­won’t accept the letter as final.  You must go to Monteriano!”

“I won’t!” he shouted back.  “I’ve been and I’ve failed.  I’ll never see the place again.  I hate Italy.”

“If you don’t go, she will.”

“Abbott?”

“Yes.  Going alone; would start this evening.  I offered to write; she said it was ‘too late!’ Too late!  The child, if you please—­Irma’s brother—­to live with her, to be brought up by her and her father at our very gates, to go to school like a gentleman, she paying.  Oh, you’re a man!  It doesn’t matter for you.  You can laugh.  But I know what people say; and that woman goes to Italy this evening.”

He seemed to be inspired.  “Then let her go!  Let her mess with Italy by herself.  She’ll come to grief somehow.  Italy’s too dangerous, too—­”

“Stop that nonsense, Philip.  I will not be disgraced by her.  I will have the child.  Pay all we’ve got for it.  I will have it.”

“Let her go to Italy!” he cried.  “Let her meddle with what she doesn’t understand!  Look at this letter!  The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow.  He’s a bounder, but he’s not an English bounder.  He’s mysterious and terrible.  He’s got a country behind him that’s upset people from the beginning of the world.”

“Harriet!” exclaimed his mother.  “Harriet shall go too.  Harriet, now, will be invaluable!” And before Philip had stopped talking nonsense, she had planned the whole thing and was looking out the trains.

Chapter 6

Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes under the beams of a vertical sun.  He now had every opportunity of seeing her at her best, for it was nearly the middle of August before he went out to meet Harriet in the Tirol.

He found his sister in a dense cloud five thousand feet above the sea, chilled to the bone, overfed, bored, and not at all unwilling to be fetched away.

“It upsets one’s plans terribly,” she remarked, as she squeezed out her sponges, “but obviously it is my duty.”

“Did mother explain it all to you?” asked Philip.

“Yes, indeed!  Mother has written me a really beautiful letter.  She describes how it was that she gradually got to feel that we must rescue the poor baby from its terrible surroundings, how she has tried by letter, and it is no good—­nothing but insincere compliments and hypocrisy came back.  Then she says, ’There is nothing like personal influence; you and Philip will succeed where I have failed.’  She says, too, that Caroline Abbott has been wonderful.”