Sir Nigel’s intention was that there should be as little intercourse between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was possible.  Among other things, he did not intend that a lot of American relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the Atlantic.  He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort.  He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new home.  He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie never condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact that the journey “to Europe” was never spoken of.

“I don’t see why they never seem to think of coming over,” she said plaintively one day.  “They used to talk so much about it.”

“They?” ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers.  “Whom may you mean?”

“Mother and father and Betty and some of the others.”

Her mother-in-law put up her eye-glasses to stare at her.

“The whole family?” she inquired.

“There are not so many of them,” Rosalie answered.

“A family is always too many to descend upon a young woman when she is married,” observed her ladyship unmovedly.  Nigel glanced over the top of his Times.

“I may as well tell you that it would not do at all,” he put in.

“Why—­why not?” exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.

“Americans don’t do in English society,” slightingly.

“But they are coming over so much.  They like London so—­all Americans like London.”

“Do they?” with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until the tears started to her eyes.  “I am afraid the sentiment is scarcely mutual.”

Rosalie turned and fled from the room.  She turned and fled because she realised that she should burst out crying if she waited to hear another word, and she realised that of late she seemed always to be bursting out crying before one or the other of those two.  She could not help it.  They always seemed to be implying something slighting or scathing.  They were always putting her in the wrong and hurting her feelings.

The day was damp and chill, but she put on her hat and ran out into the park.  She went down the avenue and turned into a coppice.  There, among the wet bracken, she sank down on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree and huddled herself in a small heap, her head on her arms, actually wailing.

“Oh, mother!  Oh, mother!” she cried hysterically.  “Oh, I do wish you would come.  I’m so cold, mother; I’m so ill!  I can’t bear it!  It seems as if you’d forgotten all about me!  You’re all so happy in New York that perhaps you have forgotten—­perhaps you have!  Oh, don’t, mother—­don’t!”