“By Jove! that’s so, good enough.  I’ll do it straight out.  I’ll tell her to take it or leave it.  No, I don’t mean that, of course.  I’ll tell her that I can’t live without her—­that sort of thing, you know.  And I can’t, that’s just the fact.”

“You can leave it confidently to her good judgment and to the friendship of the family for you.”

Lord Montague was silent for a moment, and seemed to be looking at a problem in his shrewd mind.  For he had a shrewd mind, which took in the whole situation, Mrs. Mavick and all, with a perspicacity that would have astonished that woman of the world.

“There is one thing, perhaps I ought not to say it, but I have seen it, and it is in my head that it is that—­I beg your pardon, madam—­that damned governess.”

The shot went home.  The suggestion, put into language that could be more easily comprehended than defended, illuminated Mrs. Mavick’s mind in a flash, seeming to disclose the source of an opposition to her purposes which secretly irritated her.  Doubtless it was the governess.  It was her influence that made Evelyn less pliable and amenable to reason than a young girl with such social prospects as she had would naturally be.  Besides, how absurd it was that a young lady in society should still have a governess.  A companion?  The proper companion for a girl on the edge of matrimony was her mother!

XXI

This idea, once implanted in Mrs. Mavick’s mind, bore speedy fruit.  No one would have accused her of being one of those uncomfortable persons who are always guided by an inflexible sense of justice, nor could it be said that she was unintelligently unjust.  Facile as she was, in all her successful life she had never acted upon impulse, but from a conscience keenly alive to what was just to herself.  Miss McDonald was in the way.  And Mrs. Mavick had one quality of good generalship—­she acted promptly on her convictions.

When Mr. Mavick came over next day to spend Sunday in what was called in print the bosom of his family, he looked very much worn and haggard and was in an irritated mood.  He had been very little in Newport that summer, the disturbed state of business confining him to the city.  And to a man of his age, New York in midsummer in a panicky season is not a recreation.

The moment Mrs. Mavick got her husband alone she showed a lively solicitude about his health.

“I suppose it has been dreadfully hot in the city?”

“Hot enough.  Everything makes it hot.”

“Has anything gone wrong?  Has that odious Ault turned up again?”

“Turned up is the word.  Half the time that man is a mole, half the time a bull in a china-shop.  He sails up to you bearing your own flag, and when he gets aboard he shows the skull and cross-bones.”

“Is it so bad as that?”

“As bad as what?  He is a bad lot, but he is just an adventurer—­a Napoleon who will get his Waterloo before fall.  Don’t bother about things you don’t understand.  How are things down here?”