He returned to the fireplace, and stood looking down upon her—grinning.
Mary had resumed her embroidery. She, too, was dimly conscious of something disappointing.
"Of course, if you choose to take it like that, you can," she said, rather tartly. "Of course, everything can be made ridiculous."
"Well, that's a blessing, anyway!" said Ashe, with his merry laugh. "But look here, Mary, tell me about yourself. What have you been doing?—dancing—riding, eh?"
He threw himself down beside her, and began an elder-brotherly cross-examination, which lasted till Lady Tranmore returned and begged him to go at once to his father.
When he returned to the drawing-room, Ashe found his mother alone. It was growing dark, and she was sitting idle, her hands in her lap, waiting for him.
"I must be off, dear," he said to her. "You won't come down and see me take my seat?"
She shook her head.
"I think not. What did you think of your father?"
"I don't see much change," he said, hesitating.
"No, he's much the same."
"And you?" He slid down on the sofa beside her and threw his arm round her. "Have you been fretting?"
Lady Tranmore made no reply. She was a self-contained woman, not readily moved to tears. But he felt her hand tremble as he pressed it.
"I sha'n't fret now"—she said after a moment—"now that you've come back."
Ashe's face took a very soft and tender expression.
"Mother, you know—you think a great deal too much of me—you're too ambitious for me."
She gave a sound between a laugh and a sob, and, raising her hands, she smoothed back his curly hair and held his face between them.
"When do you see Lord Parham?" she asked.
"Eight o'clock—in his room at the House. I'll send you up a note."
"You'll be home early?"
"No—don't wait for me."
She dropped her hands, after giving him a kiss on the cheek.
"I know where you're going! It's Madame d'Estrées' evening."
"Well—you don't object?"
"Object?" She shrugged her shoulders. "So long as it amuses you—You won't find one woman there to-night."
"Last time there were two," he said, smiling, as he rose from the sofa.
"I know—Lady Quantock—and Mrs. Mallory. Now they've deserted her, I hear. What fresh gossip has turned up I don't know. Of course," she sighed, "I've been out of the world. But I believe there have been developments."
"Well, I don't know anything about it—and I don't think I want to know. She's very agreeable, and one meets everybody there."
"Everybody. Ungallant creature!" she said, giving a little pull to his collar, the set of which did not please her.
"Sorry! Mother!"—his laughing eyes pursued her—"Do you want to marry me off directly?—I know you do!"
"I want nothing but what you yourself should want. Of course, you must marry."
"The young women don't care twopence about me!"
"William!—be a bear if you like, but not an idiot!"
"Perfectly true," he declared; "not the dazzlers and the high-fliers, anyway—the only ones it would be an excitement to carry off."
"You know very well," she said, slowly, "that now you might marry anybody."
He threw his head back rather haughtily.
"Oh! I wasn't thinking about money, and that kind of thing. Well, give me time, mother—don't hurry me! And now I'd better stop talking nonsense, change my clothes, and be off. Good-bye, dear—you shall hear when the job's perpetrated!"
"William, really!—don't say these things—at least to anybody but me. You understand very well"—she drew herself up rather finely—"that if I hadn't known, in spite of your apparent idleness, you would do any work they set you to do, to your own credit and the country's, I'd never have lifted a finger for you!"
William Ashe laughed out.
"Oh! intriguing mother!" he said, stooping again to kiss her. "So you admit you did it?"
He went off gayly, and she heard him flying up-stairs three steps at a time, as though he were still an untamed Eton boy, and there were no three weeks' hard political fighting behind him, and no interview which might decide his life before him.
He entered his own sitting-room on the second floor, shut the door behind him, and glanced round him with delight. It was a large room looking on a side street, and obliquely to the park. Its walls were covered with books—books which almost at first sight betrayed to the accustomed eye that they were the familiar companions of a student. Almost every volume had long paper slips inside it, and when opened would have been found to contain notes and underlinings in a somewhat reckless and destructive abundance. A large table, also loaded untidily with books and papers, stood in the centre of the room; many of them were note-books, stored with evidences of the most laborious and patient work; a Cambridge text lay beside them face downward, as he had left it on departure. His mother's housekeeper, who had been one of his best friends from babyhood, was the only person allowed to dust his room—but on the strict condition that she replaced everything as she found it.
He took up the volume, and plunged a moment headlong into the Greek chorus that met his eye. "Jolly!" he said, putting it down with a sigh of regret. "These beastly politics!"
And he went muttering to his dressing-room, summoning his valet almost with ill-temper. Yet half his library was the library of a politician, admirably chosen and exhaustively read.
The footman who answered his call understood his moods and served him at a look. Ashe complained hotly of the brushing of his dress-clothes, and worked himself into a fever over the set of his tie. Nevertheless, before he left he had managed to get from the young man the whole story of his engagement to the under-housemaid, giving him thereupon some bits of advice, jocular but trenchant, which James accepted with a readiness quite unlike his normal behavior in the circles of his class.
II
Ashe took his seat, dined, and saw the Prime Minister. These things took time, and it was not till past eleven that he presented himself in the hall of Madame d'Estrées' house in St. James's Place. Most of her guests were already gathered, but he mounted the stairs together with an old friend and an old acquaintance, Philip Darrell, one of the ablest writers of the moment, and Louis Harman, artist and man of fashion, the friend of duchesses and painter of portraits, a person much in request in many worlds.
"What a cachet they have, these houses!" said Harman, looking round him. "St. James's Place is the top!"
"Where else would you expect to find Madame d'Estrées?" asked Darrell,