her. I will write to you from Beechcote, where I shall
stay at the little inn in the village. Have you no kind word that I may
carry with me?"

Lady Lucy looked at him steadily.

"I shall write myself to Miss Mallory, Oliver."

His pallor gave place to a flush of indignation.

"Is it necessary to do anything so cruel, mother?"

"I shall not write cruelly."

He shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

"Considering what you have made up your mind to do, I should have
thought least said, soonest mended. However, if you must, you must. I
can only prepare Diana for your letter and soften it when it comes."

"In your new love, Oliver, have you quite forgotten the old?" Lady
Lucy's voice shook for the first time.

"I shall be only too glad to remember it, when you give me the
opportunity," he said, sombrely.

"I have not been a bad mother to you, Oliver. I have claims upon you."

He did not reply, and his silence wounded Lady Lucy to the quick. Was it
her fault if her husband, out of an eccentric distrust of the character
of his son, and moved by a kind of old-fashioned and Spartan belief that
a man must endure hardness before he is fit for luxury, had made her and
not Oliver the arbiter and legatee of his wealth? But Oliver had never
wanted for anything. He had only to ask. What right had she to thwart
her husband's decision?

"Good-bye, mother," said Marsham again. "If you are writing to Isabel
you will, I suppose, discuss the matter with her. She is not unlikely to
side with you--not for your reason, however--but because of some silly
nonsense about politics. If she does, I beg she will not write to me. It
could only embitter matters."

"I will give her your message. Good-bye, Oliver." He left the room, with
a gesture of farewell to Ferrier.

* * * * *

Ferrier came back toward the fire. As he did so he was struck--painfully
struck--by a change in Lady Lucy. She was not pale, and her eyes were
singularly bright. Yet age was, for the first time, written in a face
from which Time had so far taken but his lightest toll. It moved him
strangely; though, as to the matter in hand, his sympathies were all
with Oliver. But through thirty years Lady Lucy had been the only woman
for him. Since first, as a youth of twenty, he had seen her in her
father's house, he had never wavered. She was his senior by five years,
and their first acquaintance had been one of boy-adoration on his side
and