maternal feelings in an unpleasant confession. It
was not until she thought the matter out quietly at Overton that she
decided that his action was really in keeping with the rest of his
attitude towards his wife; that he did, in fact, regard her as a small
child who should be repressed and denied an active interest in his
affairs. Gabrielle's quietness had puzzled her. Perhaps this was its
explanation.

For the time the story absorbed her and she thought no more of
Gabrielle. Considine was such an excellent listener, sitting there
with his long fingers knotted and his eyes fixed on her, that she found
herself subject to the same sort of mesmeric influence as had overcome
Lord Halberton. He inspired her with a curious confidence, and she
began to hope, almost passionately, that he would undertake the care of
Arthur. Before she had finished her narrative she was assailed with a
fear that he wouldn't--he seemed to be weighing the matter so carefully
in his mind--and burst out with an abrupt: "But you _will_ take him,
won't you?"

Considine smiled. "I shall be delighted," he said.

Her thankfulness, at the end of so much strain, almost bowled her over.

"You make me feel more settled about him already," she said. "I'm
almost certain that he will be happy here. I feel that I'm so lucky to
have heard of you. You and your wife," she added, for all the time
that she had been speaking, she had been conscious of the silent
interest of Gabrielle. When it came to a question of terms there was
nothing indefinite about Considine. The fees that he suggested were
enormous, but Mrs. Payne's faith in him was by this time so secure that
she would gladly have paid anything. All through the rest of her visit
this slow and steady confidence increased. From the bedroom in which
she slept she could see the wide expanse of the home fields. It seemed
to her that the quiet of Lapton was deeper and mellower and more
intense than any she had ever known. It was saturated with the sense
of ancient, stable, sane tradition. It breathed an atmosphere in which
nothing violent or strange or abnormal could ever flourish. She felt
that, in contrast with their restless modern Cotswold home, its intense
normality must surely have some subtle reassuring effect upon her son.
Gazing over those yellow fields in the early morning she felt a more
settled happiness than she had ever known since her husband's death.

So, full of hope, she retur