, holding her a while, and we looked at each other through the
dusk. "You couldn't do more if he were my son."

"Oh if he had been your son he'd have kept out of it! I like him for
himself. He's simple and sane and honest--he needs affection."

"He would have quite the most remarkable of mothers-in-law!" I
commented.

Mrs. Pallant gave a small dry laugh--she wasn't joking. We lingered
by the lake while I thought over what she had said to me and while she
herself apparently thought. I confess that even close at her side and
under the strong impression of her sincerity, her indifference to the
conventional graces, my imagination, my constitutional scepticism began
to range. Queer ideas came into my head. Was the comedy on HER side and
not on the girl's, and was she posturing as a magnanimous woman at
poor Linda's expense? Was she determined, in spite of the young lady's
preference, to keep her daughter for a grander personage than a young
American whose dollars were not numerous enough--numerous as they
were--to make up for his want of high relationships, and had she
invented at once the boldest and the subtlest of games in order to keep
the case in her hands? If she was prepared really to address herself to
Archie she would have to go very far to overcome the mistrust he would
be sure to feel at a proceeding superficially so sinister? Was she
prepared to go far enough? The answer to these doubts was simply the way
I had been touched--it came back to me the next moment--when she used
the words "people like us." Their effect was to wring my heart. She
seemed to kneel in the dust, and I felt in a manner ashamed that I had
let her sink to it. She said to me at last that I must wait no longer, I
must go away before the young people came back. They were staying long,
too long; all the more reason then she should deal with my nephew that
night. I must drive back to Stresa, or if I liked I could go on foot:
it wasn't far--for an active man. She disposed of me freely, she was so
full of her purpose; and after we had quitted the garden and returned to
the terrace above she seemed almost to push me to leave her--I felt her
fine consecrated hands fairly quiver on my shoulders. I was ready to do
as she prescribed; she affected me painfully, she had given me a "turn,"
and I wanted to get away from her. But before I went I asked her why
Linda should regard my young man as such a parti; it didn't square after
all with her account of t