highly probable, however, that Biddy would come in early that
afternoon: there was something or other, some common social duty, she
had condescended to promise she would perform with Grace. Poor Lady
Agnes, whom Peter found somehow at once grim and very prostrate--she
assured her nephew her nerves were all gone--almost abused her younger
daughter for two minutes, having evidently a deep-seated need of abusing
some one. I must yet add that she didn't wait to meet Grace's eye before
recovering, by a rapid gyration, her view of the possibilities of
things--those possibilities from which she still might squeeze, as a
parent almost in despair, the drop that would sweeten her cup. "Dear
child," she had the presence of mind to subjoin, "her only fault is
after all that she adores her brother. She has a capacity for adoration
and must always take her gospel from some one."

Grace declared to Peter that her sister would have stayed at home if she
had dreamed he was coming, and Lady Agnes let him know that she had
heard all about the hour he had spent with the poor child at Nick's
place and about his extraordinary good nature in taking the two girls to
the play. Peter lunched in Calcutta Gardens, spending an hour there
which proved at first unexpectedly and, as seemed to him, unfairly
dismal. He knew from his own general perceptions, from what Biddy had
told him and from what he had heard Nick say in Balaklava Place, that
his aunt would have been wounded by her son's apostasy; but it was not
till he saw her that he appreciated the dark difference this young man's
behaviour had made in the outlook of his family. Evidently that
behaviour had sprung a dreadful leak in the great vessel of their hopes.
These were things no outsider could measure, and they were none of an
outsider's business; it was enough that Lady Agnes struck him really as
a woman who had received her death-blow. She looked ten years older; she
was white and haggard and tragic. Her eyes burned with a strange fitful
fire that prompted one to conclude her children had better look out for
her. When not filled with this unnatural flame they were suffused with
comfortless tears; and altogether the afflicted lady was, as he viewed
her, very bad, a case for anxiety. It was because he had known she would
be very bad that he had, in his kindness, called on her exactly in this
manner; but he recognised that to undertake to be kind to her in
proportion to her need might carry