Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/189

Rh had drawn her away from a festival as yet only imperfectly commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and rattling up to St. John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had wished to be in time she had also desired not to be abrupt; she would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and justifiably (the small hours had come), to see what her young charges were doing. She would probably have gathered that they were quarrelling, and she appeared now to be telegraphing to Sherringham to know if it were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he only felt that before he made way for the odious old woman there was one faint little spark he might strike from Miriam's flint.

Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned again to his companion, half expecting that she would have taken her chance to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.

"Don't let us part so disagreeably," she said, "with your trying to make me feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking—we only hurt each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure—when you have such a capital