ace, and whether
the bird on her brown velvet hat could cry "cuckoo" like the one in the
nursery clock.

And to Sophy there came the words of Constance:

"Do, child, go to it' grandam, child:
Give grandam kingdom, and it' grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig."

For it galled her that Lady Wychcote should never have shown the least
interest in the boy, until it had occurred to her that some day he might
serve her ambition.

Chesney saw his mother for a few minutes before she went. He was languid
but apparently quite normal. He exaggerated this languor, as later on he
exaggerated a certain nervousness consequent on the fact that he dared
not take as much morphia as he really wanted, fearing that Gaynor, at
least, might suspect something, and well aware that a man under reduced
doses of the drug shows symptoms of extreme weakness and restlessness.
When she asked if he would see Craig Hopkins that afternoon, he replied
good-humouredly:

"Bring in the performing poodles as soon as you like. Since I'm in for
it, the show might as well begin promptly."

"Cecil is _most_ reasonable--I did not hope as much as this," she told
Sophy. Then she took her departure, adding:

"And now I must set the Town talking the way we wish."

It had been agreed between her and Sophy that she should spread reports
to the effect that Cecil was suffering from an attack of inflammation of
the brain. She had submitted this idea to Dr. Hopkins yesterday, and he
had agreed that it was wise and permissible under the circumstances.

Lady Wychcote was a clever woman. She set this report going with such
skill and so apt a measure of detail that even the sceptical Olive
Arundel was quite taken in by it. The people who chiefly mattered, and
those who had been present at the painful dinner, were only too glad to
accept such a solution of the disgraceful scene. Only Oswald Tyne smiled
behind Lady Wychcote's well-preserved and still girlish back, his
mocking, unctuous smile, and said: "I would rather dream of the
degrading spectacle of a British plum-pudding served in flames at an
Athenian banquet than see again at a London feast the brain of an
Englishman thus ignited. Both are too massive to burn gracefully. But
the plum-pudding has a lightness--a delicacy--a wholesomeness--which the
British cerebrum even in flames can never accomplish."

Olive, to whom Tyne made these remarks, exclaimed, much vexed:

"Oswald! You are _bwutal_. Y