e had come over Mademoiselle Mariposa. She was no longer the
Dreaming Gipsy, but a _grande dame_, a lady with some subtle, exotic
touch of foreign distinction, who greeted the older woman with a charming
and reserved grace.

Mrs. Ames seated herself on the extreme edge of a stiff chair.
"Mademoiselle Mariposa," her thin voice rang authoritatively, "I had
hoped to see you alone for a few moments of private conversation."

"Just so, madame," responded Ydo suavely, "but I have no secrets from Mr.
Hayden. He is an old friend, an adviser, I may call him."

"Humph!" Again the lorgnon was turned threateningly on Hayden. "Very
well, since you have brought this on yourself, you may take the
consequences. I will continue with what I have to say. Mademoiselle, I
have had a recent and most distressing interview with my son. To put it
frankly, I was reproaching him with his devotion to a most ineligible
young woman, and he, in a rage, informed me that he cared nothing for
her, and proclaimed, openly proclaimed, his infatuation for you."

"Wilfred!" Ydo sat upright, her languid gaze brightening. "Really!"

"Wilfred?" the mother repeated, with a rising inflection.

"Yes, Wilfred; you were speaking of him, were you not?" The Mariposa's
green eyes sparkled with mirth. "Well, madame"--she spoke
negligently--"what can I do for you? You know I do not receive any one
professionally on Sunday."

"Would you regard it as professional if I ask you what you are going to
do about my son?"

"Not at all. I think it quite natural that you should wish to know. I can
quite appreciate your state of mind, maternal anxiety, and all that. To
have been in terror for fear your son would marry Marcia Oldham and then
discover that he is really interested in me! It illuminates that passage
in _Paradise Lost_, does it not? It is sometimes considered obscure. You
doubtless recall it. Something about 'and in the lowest depths a lower
depth was found.'"

"You seem to have some appreciation of the situation," said the old woman
grimly.

"Believe me, I have. Only the mask smiles Comedy at me, and Tragedy at
you. Madame, why do you cluck so over your one chicken?"

"The answer to that," Mrs. Ames tartly replied, "is first Miss Oldham and
then yourself."

"The declining scale! Fancy where he will end!" Ydo murmured.

"It may be a circus-rider yet," admitted his mother.

"I have been one," announced Ydo calmly, and Hayden could not tell
whether she spo