sportive, vexatious vagueness. Evidently Miriam's
warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited
her anxious mother at the garden door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with
precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced
herself--had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and
muddled calculations had drawn her from a feast as yet too imperfectly
commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been
intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company
and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and
rattling up to Saint John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had
wished to be in time she had also desired not to be impertinent, and
would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to
promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to
abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and
justifiably--the small hours having come--to see what her young charges
were "up to." She would probably have gathered that they were
quarrelling, and she appeared now to be motioning to Peter to know if it
were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he
only felt that before he made way for the poor, odious lady there was
one small spark he might strike from Miriam's flint.

Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned
again to his companion, half-expecting she would have taken her chance
to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other
egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was
in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and
she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.

"Don't let us part so harshly," she said--"with your trying to make me
feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking--we only hurt
each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our
business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure--when you've such a capital
one. Try it, try it, my dear friend--you'll see! I wish you the highest
promotion and the quickest--every success and every reward. When you've
got them all, some day, and I've become a great swell too, we'll meet on
that solid basis and you'll be glad I've been dreadful now."

"Surely before I leave you I've a right to ask you this," he answered,
holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell sh