is country."

Lady Caroline made no attempt to take this up. "And so much of it," she
carried on her sentence, "has been wasted in talking to people I really
hadn't the slightest desire to see, that you must excuse me if I go
straight to the point."

Margaret felt a sudden tension of the heart. "Of course," she said
while a voice within her cried: "He is dead--he has left me a message."

There was another pause; then Lady Caroline went on, with increasing
asperity: "So that--in short--if I _could_ see Mrs. Ransom at once--"

Margaret looked up in surprise. "I am Mrs. Ransom," she said.

The other stared a moment, with much the same look of cautious
incredulity that had marked her inspection of the drawing-room. Then
light came to her.

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have said that I wished to see Mrs.
_Robert_ Ransom, not Mrs. Ransom. But I understood that in the States
you don't make those distinctions." She paused a moment, and then went
on, before Margaret could answer: "Perhaps, after all, it's as well
that I should see you instead, since you're evidently one of the
household--your son and his wife live with you, I suppose? Yes, on the
whole, then, it's better--I shall be able to talk so much more
frankly." She spoke as if, as a rule, circumstances prevented her
giving rein to this propensity. "And frankness, of course, is the only
way out of this--this extremely tiresome complication. You know, I
suppose, that my nephew thinks he's in love with your daughter-in-law?"

Margaret made a slight movement, but her visitor pressed on without
heeding it. "Oh, don't fancy, please, that I'm pretending to take a
high moral ground--though his mother does, poor dear! I can perfectly
imagine that in a place like this--I've just been driving about it for
two hours--a young man of Guy's age would _have_ to provide himself
with some sort of distraction, and he's not the kind to go in for
anything objectionable. Oh, we quite allow for that--we should allow
for the whole affair, if it hadn't so preposterously ended in his
throwing over the girl he was engaged to, and upsetting an arrangement
that affected a number of people besides himself. I understand that in
the States it's different--the young people have only themselves to
consider. In England--in our class, I mean--a great deal may depend on
a young man's making a good match; and in Guy's case I may say that his
mother and sisters (I won't include myself, though I migh