"Walking!" curtly.
"Not all this time! And your boots! You did not change your boots!"
"No, aunt."
"Cyril, this is very wrong. This really is most, reprehensible. I could not have thought it of you."
Unyielding silence answered the reproach, and Sybella's voice began to shake.
"I could not have believed in such behaviour. It is too bad—too ungrateful! But of course, I understand what makes you so unlike yourself. I quite understand. It is all the fault of those Trevelyans! The effect of being thrown too much with Jean! I am sure if I had thought—But I have been too kind—too indulgent! One finds one's mistakes—I shall have to take measures—strict measures! Lady Lucas is right! The thing cannot go on."
Be it remarked, Sybella had studiously resolved to say nothing of all this, to make no allusion to the Trevelyans; above all, to utter no hint respecting Lady Lucas' advice. She did not wish to warn her nephew, or to annoy him afresh. Sybella's resolutions were, however, apt to fail when the moment came for carrying them out.
"It is all the fault of those Trevelyans," she went on in her usual style of aimless repetition. "I suppose they have been setting you against me. And Jean—Have you been there again?"
"No!"
Little though Sybella knew it, a kind and grieved word on his first entrance—such a word as a mother might have spoken—would have softened him at once into his ordinary self. He was dead-beat with hours of vehement walking and indignation, just in the state to be melted by any touch of tenderness. His pale lips might have told their tale to Sybella, but she was far too full of her own annoyance to be observant. The above utterances, the contemptuous expression "those Trevelyans," the unjust accusations levelled against his friends, hardened him afresh. Sybella was losing an opportunity, not likely to return.