with me--with us--for his own benefit."

"Yes--you were right--you knew him better than I did," said Sophy with
generous humility. She, too, felt softened towards her mother-in-law
because her maternal intuition had been right, when she, Sophy, as a
wife, had doubted.

"Very nice of you to admit it, I'm sure," said Lady Wychcote affably.
She was so highly pleased that all her ideas were by way of being
carried out, that she actually asked to see Bobby. This was a wonderful
condescension, for from the day of his birth she seemed scarcely to have
been aware of his existence.

"I will go to the nursery if you like," she said, as it were a Queen
saying with royal affectation of equality: "See, I am even prepared to
descend from my dais and walk on a level with you."

"Thanks--but there's no need," said Sophy. "I will have him brought
here."

Lady Wychcote had not seen the child, except at a distance, since he
could walk and talk. As his nurse set him upon his feet, and his sturdy
little figure came towards her, strutting mannishly, serious but
unafraid, something stirred in her chilly breast--something not exactly
warm but pungent. The child had the look of her own family. It had been
a family noted for its statesmen. What possibilities might not lie hid
in that small, firm breast under its ruffled collar! It came over her
in a sudden tingling wave of resuscitated hope and fact abruptly
realised, that in case of Gerald's dying childless--_this_ child would
be heir to the title. He was a Chesney after all. He had the name, and
her own blood in his veins. The mother was only the "incalculable
quantity" in the sum of this higher spiritual mathematics.
Inconsistently, as with all tyrants, her mind whirled about, accepting
as a pleasing possibility what had until then only occurred to her as an
insufferable one--a weapon with which to goad Gerald, when his
disinclination to marry put her beyond all patience. Now as she looked
at Bobby, who had gone straight to his mother's knee, and stood biting
his small fist, and regarding her solemnly out of grey, noncommittal
eyes, she thought, "Why not! He is my grandchild after all." She even
spoke her thought aloud.

"Has it ever occurred to you that that child may be Lord Wychcote some
day, in case Gerald dies unmarried!" she asked.

It had occurred to Sophy, for Cecil had spoken once or twice of such a
possibility--but he had spoken of it grumblingly.

"If that duffer Gerald d