ichard. He grew
reckless, though reckless of precisely what, innocent as he was, in
fact although mature in learning, he knew not as yet. Only he turned on
his mother a face at once eager and shy, coaxing her as when in his
long-ago baby-days he had implored some petty indulgence or the gift of
some coveted toy on which his little heart was set.

"Yes, let us have them," he said. "You know Helen is very charming. You
will admire her, mother. She is as clever as she can stick, one sees
that at a glance. And she is very much _grande dame_ too--and, oh,
well, she is a whole lot of charming things! And her coming would be a
wholesome breaking up of our ordinary ways of going on. We are usually
very contented--at least, I think so--you, and dear Julius, and I, but
perhaps we are getting into a bit of a rut. Helen's society might prove
an even more efficacious method of driving out my blue-devils than
Knott's lancet or a jolly good spanking."

He laughed quietly, patting Katherine's hand, but looking away.

"And there is no denying it would be a vastly more graceful one--don't
you think so?"

Thus were smouldering fires of personal ambition quenched in Lady
Calmady, as so often before. Richard's tenderness brought her to her
knees. She hugged, with an almost voluptuous movement of passion, that
half-rejected burden of maternity, gathering it close against her heart
once more. But, along with the rapture of self-surrender, came a
thousand familiar fears and anxieties. For she had looked into Dickie's
mind, as he spoke out his grumble, and had there perceived the
existence of much which she had dreaded and to the existence of which
she had striven to blind herself.

"My darling," she said, with a certain hesitation, "I will gladly have
them if you wish it--only you remember what happened long ago when
Helen was here last?"

"Yes, I know, I was afraid you would think of that. But you can put
that aside. Helen's not the smallest recollection of it. She told me so
this afternoon."

"Told you so?" Katherine repeated.

"Yes," he said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been
bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and
I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite
amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really
happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the
subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would