When six o’clock struck and they had not returned she felt really uneasy, although she was not at all a nervous mother, and seldom, or never, worried about her little son.  She could not doubt any longer that something unexpected had occurred.  They were dining at half-past seven that night.  In an hour’s time at the latest she and Dion would have to dress.  The hopes she had set on the family tea were vanishing.  In her uneasiness she began to feel almost absurdly disappointed about the tea.  She was hungry, too; she had had no lunch just because of the tea.  It was to be a sort of family revel, and she had wished to enjoy it in every way, to make of it a real meal.  Her abstention from lunch now seemed to her almost pitiful.  Disappointment became acute in her.  Yet even now her uneasiness, though definite, was not strong.  If it had been she would not have been able to feel so disappointed, even so sorry for herself.  She had given up the day to Dion.  The nursery tea was to have been her little reward.  Now she would be deprived of it.  For a moment she felt hurt, almost the least bit angry.

As the words formed themselves in her mind she heard the quarter-past six chime out in the tower.  She stood still on the path.  What had happened?  Perhaps Robin had fallen off Jane and hurt himself, or perhaps there had been an accident when they were driving home.  Harrington’s horse was probably a crock.  He might have fallen down.  The dogcart was a high one——­

She pulled herself up.  She had always secretly rather despised the typical “anxious mother,” had always thought that the love which shows itself in perpetual fear was a silly, poor sort of affection.  Even when Robin, as a baby, had once been seriously ill, at the time of the Clarke divorce case, she had been calm, had shown complete self-control.  She had even surprised people by her fearlessness and quiet determination.

They did not know how she had prayed, and almost agonized in secret.  She had drawn the calm at which they had wondered from prayer.  She had asked God to let Robin get well, and she had felt that her prayer had been heard, and that God would grant her the life of her child.

Perhaps she had exaggerated to herself the danger he was in.  But he was ill—­for a short time he was very ill, and a baby’s hold on life is but frail.

Now she remembered her self-control during Robin’s illness, and resolutely she banished her anxiety.  There was no doubt some perfectly simple explanation which presently would account to her for their not coming at the tea hour.

“Ma’am!” cried a respectable voice.  “Ma-a-am!”

“What is it, Nurse.  They haven’t come back?”

Nurse was coming down the path gingerly, with a shawl over her cap.

“No, ma’am.  Whatever can have happened? Something’s a-happened, that’s certain.”

“Nonsense, Nurse!”

“But whatever should keep them out till late into the night, ma’am?”