From this little dialogue, it may be imagined that though Mrs Roper was as good as her word, she was not exactly the woman whom Mrs Eames would have wished to select as a protecting angel for her son.  But the truth I take to be this, that protecting angels for widows’ sons, at forty-eight pounds a year, paid quarterly, are not to be found very readily in London.  Mrs Roper was not worse than others of her class.  She would much have preferred lodgers who were respectable to those who were not so,—­if she could only have found respectable lodgers as she wanted them.  Mr and Mrs Lupex hardly came under that denomination; and when she gave them up her big front bedroom at a hundred a year, she knew she was doing wrong.  And she was troubled, too, about her own daughter Amelia, who was already over thirty years of age.  Amelia was a very clever young woman, who had been, if the truth must be told, first young lady at a millinery establishment in Manchester.  Mrs Roper knew that Mrs Eames and Mrs Cradell would not wish their sons to associate with her daughter.  But what could she do?  She could not refuse the shelter of her own house to her own child, and yet her heart misgave her when she saw Amelia flirting with young Eames.

“I wish, Amelia, you wouldn’t have so much to say to that young man.”

“Laws, mother.”

“So I do.  If you go on like that, you’ll put me out of both my lodgers.”

“Go on like what, mother?  If a gentleman speaks to me, I suppose I’m to answer him?  I know how to behave myself, I believe.”  And then she gave her head a toss.  Whereupon her mother was silent; for her mother was afraid of her.

CHAPTER V

About L. D.

Apollo Crosbie left London for Allington on the 31st of August, intending to stay there four weeks, with the declared intention of recruiting his strength by an absence of two months from official cares, and with no fixed purpose as to his destiny for the last of those two months.  Offers of hospitality had been made to him by the dozen.  Lady Hartletop’s doors, in Shropshire, were open to him, if he chose to enter them.  He had been invited by the Countess de Courcy to join her suite at Courcy Castle.  His special friend, Montgomerie Dobbs, had a place in Scotland, and then there was a yachting party by which he was much wanted.  But Mr Crosbie had as yet knocked himself down to none of these biddings, having before him when he left London no other fixed engagement than that which took him to Allington.  On the first of October we shall also find ourselves at Allington in company with Johnny Eames; and Apollo Crosbie will still be there,—­by no means to the comfort of our friend from the Income-tax Office.

Johnny Eames cannot be called unlucky in that matter of his annual holiday, seeing that he was allowed to leave London in October, a month during which few chose to own that they remain in town.  For myself, I always regard May as the best month for holiday-making; but then no Londoner cares to be absent in May.  Young Eames, though he lived in Burton Crescent and had as yet no connection with the West End, had already learned his lesson in this respect.  “Those fellows in the big room want me to take May,” he had said to his friend Cradell.  “They must think I’m uncommon green.”