Margaret assented.

“Because your American houses, especially in the provincial towns, all look so remarkably alike, that I thought I might have been mistaken; and as my time is extremely limited—­in fact I’m sailing on Wednesday—­”

She paused long enough to let Margaret say:  “I had no idea you were in this country.”

Lady Caroline made no attempt to take this up.  “And so much of it,” she carried on her sentence, “has been wasted in talking to people I really hadn’t the slightest desire to see, that you must excuse me if I go straight to the point.”

Margaret felt a sudden tension of the heart.  “Of course,” she said while a voice within her cried:  “He is dead—­he has left me a message.”

There was another pause; then Lady Caroline went on, with increasing asperity:  “So that—­in short—­if I could see Mrs. Ransom at once—­”

Margaret looked up in surprise.  “I am Mrs. Ransom,” she said.

The other stared a moment, with much the same look of cautious incredulity that had marked her inspection of the drawing-room.  Then light came to her.

“Oh, I beg your pardon.  I should have said that I wished to see Mrs. Robert Ransom, not Mrs. Ransom.  But I understood that in the States you don’t make those distinctions.”  She paused a moment, and then went on, before Margaret could answer:  “Perhaps, after all, it’s as well that I should see you instead, since you’re evidently one of the household—­your son and his wife live with you, I suppose?  Yes, on the whole, then, it’s better—­I shall be able to talk so much more frankly.”  She spoke as if, as a rule, circumstances prevented her giving rein to this propensity.  “And frankness, of course, is the only way out of this—­this extremely tiresome complication.  You know, I suppose, that my nephew thinks he’s in love with your daughter-in-law?”

Margaret made a slight movement, but her visitor pressed on without heeding it.  “Oh, don’t fancy, please, that I’m pretending to take a high moral ground—­though his mother does, poor dear!  I can perfectly imagine that in a place like this—­I’ve just been driving about it for two hours—­a young man of Guy’s age would have to provide himself with some sort of distraction, and he’s not the kind to go in for anything objectionable.  Oh, we quite allow for that—­we should allow for the whole affair, if it hadn’t so preposterously ended in his throwing over the girl he was engaged to, and upsetting an arrangement that affected a number of people besides himself.  I understand that in the States it’s different—­the young people have only themselves to consider.  In England—­in our class, I mean—­a great deal may depend on a young man’s making a good match; and in Guy’s case I may say that his mother and sisters (I won’t include myself, though I might) have been simply stranded—­thrown overboard—­by his freak.  You can understand how serious it is