is," Mr. Brumley resumed. "I am going up
there to London for a time with my boy. Then perhaps we may
travel-Germany, Italy, perhaps-in his holidays. It is beginning again, I
feel with him. But then even we two must drift apart. I can't deny him a
public school sooner or later. His own road...."

"It will be lonely for you," sympathized the lady. "I have my work,"
said Mr. Brumley with a sort of valiant sadness.

"Yes, I suppose your work----"

She left an eloquent gap.

"There, of course, one's fortunate," said Mr. Brumley.

"I wish," said Lady Harman, with a sudden frankness and a little
quickening of her colour, "that I had some work. Something--that was my
own."

"But you have----There are social duties. There must be all sorts of
things."

"There are--all sorts of things. I suppose I'm ungrateful. I have my
children."

"You have children, Lady Harman!"

"I've _four_."

He was really astonished, "Your _own_?"

She turned her fawn's eyes on his with a sudden wonder at his meaning.
"My own!" she said with the faintest tinge of astonished laughter in her
voice. "What else could they be?"

"I thought----I thought you might have step-children."

"Oh! of course! No! I'm their mother;--all four of them. They're mine as
far as that goes. Anyhow."

And her eye questioned him again for his intentions.

But his thought ran along its own path. "You see," he said, "there is
something about you--so freshly beginning life. So like--Spring."

"You thought I was too young! I'm nearly six-and-twenty! But all the
same,--though they're mine,--_still_----Why shouldn't a woman have work
in the world, Mr. Brumley? In spite of all that."

"But surely--that's the most beautiful work in the world that anyone
could possibly have."

Lady Harman reflected. She seemed to hesitate on the verge of some
answer and not to say it.

"You see," she said, "it may have been different with you.... When one
has a lot of nurses, and not very much authority."

She coloured deeply and broke back from the impending revelations.

"No," she said, "I would like some work of my own."

Sec.3

At this point their conversation was interrupted by the lady's chauffeur
in a manner that struck Mr. Brumley as extraordinary, but which the tall
lady evidently regarded as the most natural thing in the world.

Mr. Clarence appeared walking across the lawn towards them, surveying
the charms of as obviously a charming garden as one could have, w