Harvey met her look, and replied quietly.

’It isn’t that I’m anxious about him.  I have to plan for his education, that’s all.’

’You’re beginning rather early.  Fathers don’t generally look after their children so young.’

‘Unfortunately, they don’t,’ said Harvey, with a laugh.  ’Mothers do, here and there.’

‘But surely you don’t mean that I am neglectful, Harvey?’

‘Not at all.  Teaching isn’t your metier, Alma.’

’I have always confessed that.  But, then, the time for teaching Hughie has hardly come.  What can Pauline do but just see that he doesn’t get into mischief?’

’That’s the very reason why he would be better for two or three hours a day with some one who knows how to teach a child of his age.  It isn’t as unimportant as you think.  Pauline does very well, but Mrs. Abbott will do better.’

Vexed at his own cowardliness —­ for he could not utter the words that leaped to his tongue —­ Harvey fell into a perverse insistence on Mrs Abbott’s merits.  He had meant to confine himself within the safe excuse that the child needed companionship.  Forbidden the natural relief of a wholesome, hearty outburst of anger —­ which would have done good in many ways —­ his nerves drove him into smothered petulance, with the result that Alma misread him, and saw in his words a significance quite apart from their plain meaning.

‘I have not the least intention of interfering, Harvey,’ she said, with her distant smile.  ’For the next few months I shall be very busy indeed.  Only one thing I would ask —­ you don’t think of leaving this house before midsummer?’

‘No.’

’Because I shall probably give my recital in May, and it would be rather inconvenient ——­’

‘Everything shall be arranged to suit you.’

‘Not at all, not at all!’ she exclaimed cheerfully.  ’I don’t ask so much as that; it would be unreasonable.  We are neither of us to stand in the other’s way —­ isn’t that the agreement?  Tell me your plans, and you shall know mine, and I’m sure everything will be managed very well.’

So the conversation ended, satisfactorily to neither.  Harvey, aware of having spoken indiscreetly, felt that he was still more to blame for allowing his wife a freedom of which she threatened to make absurd use; and Alma, her feelings both as wife and mother sensibly perturbed, resented the imputation which seemed to have been thrown upon her conduct.  This resentment was of course none the less enduring because conscience took her husband’s side.  She remembered her appointment tomorrow (practically an appointment) with Cyrus Redgrave at the Crystal Palace; would not that be more difficult to confess than anything she could reasonably suppose to have happened between Harvey and Mary Abbott?  Yet more than ever she hoped to meet Redgrave, to hold him by a new link of illusory temptation, that he might exert himself to the utmost