that?"

"Yes, very warmly; also about our international relations."

Lord Ashbridge gave a little giggle.

"I must tell Barbara that," he said. "She has become a sort of
Cassandra, since she became a diplomatist, and sits on her tripod and
prophesies woe."

"She asked me about it," said Michael. "I don't think she believes in
his sincerity."

He giggled again.

"That's because I didn't ask her down for his visit," he said.

He rose.

"And what are you going to do, my dear?" he said to his wife.

She looked across to Michael.

"Perhaps Michael will come for a stroll with me," she said.

"No doubt he will. I shall have a round of golf, I think, on this fine
morning. I should like to have a word with you, Michael, when you've
finished your breakfast."

The moment he had gone her whole manner changed: it was suffused with
the glow that had lit her last night.

"And we shall have another talk, dear?" she said. "It was tiresome being
interrupted last night. But your father was better pleased with you this
morning."

Michael's understanding of the situation grew clearer. Whatever was the
change in his mother, whatever, perhaps, it portended, it was certainly
accompanied by two symptoms, the one the late dawning of mother-love for
himself, the other a certain fear of her husband; for all her married
life she had been completely dominated by him, and had lived but in a
twilight of her own; now into that twilight was beginning to steal
a dread of him. His pleasure or his vexation had begun to affect her
emotionally, instead of being as before, merely recorded in her mind,
as she might have recorded an object quite exterior to herself, and seen
out of the window. Now it was in the room with her. Even as Michael
left her to speak with him, the consciousness of him rose again in her,
making her face anxious.

"And you'll try not to vex him, won't you?" she said.

His father was in the smoking-room, standing enormously in front of the
fire, and for the first time the sense of his colossal fatuity struck
Michael.

"There are several things I want to tell you about," he said. "Your
career, first of all. I take it that you have no intention of deferring
to my wishes on the subject."

"No, father, I am afraid not," said Michael.

"I want you to understand, then, that, though I shall not speak to
you again about it, my wishes are no less strong than they were. It is
something to me to know that a man whom I re