n. That especial laugh always meant yielding on Cecil's part.
She turned again to Bobby, her lip quivering in spite of her will.

"Come, darling.... Come to mother...." she whispered.

Suddenly the boy let her take him. He was trembling all over, but
scorned to cry.

Amaldi murmured a few formalities and left. With Bobby close in her
arms, Sophy went quickly past her husband out of the room. He made no
effort to detain her.

VII

It was very hard to get Bobby to sleep that night. At last, however, he
wearily subsided against Sophy's breast and, thumb in mouth, demanded
"All a gees." This meant the old nursery song of "All the pretty little
horses." Obediently she began to sing in her rich contralto that was
like the flutes and viols of love, tempered to the inanity of the
nursery rhyme. But though she sang and sang, it was after seven o'clock
before the boy fell fast asleep. She dressed hurriedly for dinner,
slipping into a tea-gown of dull orange that Cecil particularly liked.
She had made up her mind to talk to him about his attitude towards
Bobby. She wished it to be as quiet a talk as possible, so she put on
the orange tea-gown to please him, and set in her hair some tiny, orange
lilies that had been sent down from Dynehurst that morning. He liked her
to wear flowers in her hair. But though she made these preparations, she
was quite determined to face anything in the matter of having "her say
out" about his relations with the boy. She had long realised, in
silence, that there was a strong antagonism between father and son. It
seemed terrible, but she knew that such things were. It had been the
same between Cecil and his own father. But she would not have the child
terrorised and herself treated with indignity because of Cecil's moods.
No; not even his illness could make her put up with that. And she
thought, with a hot wave of pain and shame, of the scene that Amaldi had
just witnessed.

Chesney came in to dinner, rather late and very much excited. He began
rattling politics to her. The damned government was going under. He'd
give it two more years. Then, by Jove! he was going to cut in and give
his Radicalism a fling! The Conservatives were pretty well played out;
they'd been in just four years too long, confound 'em! 'Twas Kitty
O'Shea had saved the Union for 'em, and none of those rotters in office.
As a clever Irish Unionist had said, they ought to raise statues to
Kitty O'Shea all over Ulster--an