Mrs. Le Geyt smiled a compassionate smile.  “Ah, I forgot,” she cooed, sweetly.  “Dear Hugo never can understand the upbringing of children.  It is a sense denied him.  We women know”—­with a sage nod.  “They were wild little savages when I took them in hand first—­weren’t you, Maisie?  Do you remember, dear, how you broke the looking-glass in the boudoir, like an untamed young monkey?  Talking of monkeys, Mr. Cotswould, have you seen those delightful, clever, amusing French pictures at that place in Suffolk Street?  There’s a man there—­a Parisian—­I forget his honoured name—­ Leblanc, or Lenoir, or Lebrun, or something—­but he’s a most humorous artist, and he paints monkeys and storks and all sorts of queer beasties almost as quaintly and expressively as you do.  Mind, I say almost, for I never will allow that any Frenchman could do anything quite so good, quite so funnily mock-human, as your marabouts and professors.”

“What a charming hostess Mrs. Le Geyt makes,” the painter observed to me, after lunch.  “Such tact!  Such discrimination! . . .  And, what a devoted stepmother!”

“She is one of the local secretaries of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,” I said, drily.

“And charity begins at home,” Hilda Wade added, in a significant aside.

We walked home together as far as Stanhope Gate.  Our sense of doom oppressed us.  “And yet,” I said, turning to her, as we left the doorstep, “I don’t doubt Mrs. Le Geyt really believes she is a model stepmother!”

“Of course she believes it,” my witch answered.  “She has no more doubt about that than about anything else.  Doubts are not in her line.  She does everything exactly as it ought to be done—­who should know, if not she?—­and therefore she is never afraid of criticism.  Hardening, indeed! that poor slender, tender, shrinking little Ettie!  A frail exotic.  She would harden her into a skeleton if she had her way.  Nothing’s much harder than a skeleton, I suppose, except Mrs. Le Geyt’s manner of training one.”

“I should be sorry to think,” I broke in, “that that sweet little floating thistle-down of a child I once knew was to be done to death by her.”

“Oh, as for that, she will not be done to death,” Hilda answered, in her confident way.  “Mrs. Le Geyt won’t live long enough.”

I started.  “You think not?”

“I don’t think, I am sure of it.  We are at the fifth act now.  I watched Mr. Le Geyt closely all through lunch, and I’m more confident than ever that the end is coming.  He is temporarily crushed; but he is like steam in a boiler, seething, seething, seething.  One day she will sit on the safety-valve, and the explosion will come.  When it comes”—­she raised aloft one quick hand in the air as if striking a dagger home—­“good-bye to her!”