“I will take mammy to the theatre,” he suddenly thought.
Upstairs he bounded—she was not in the drawing-room. Once more he rushed up the stairs three steps at a time and bounced up against Mrs. Mervyn.
“My dear boy!” Mrs. Mervyn was astonished, but not disconcerted.
It did her good to see the long disconsolate widower “alive again,” as she said afterwards to her husband.
“I came to see if you would come to the theatre, to-night,” he said, in a low voice. “Don’t say anything before the servants—but after dinner, we three can just go and see anything good that you would care to see.”
Mrs. Mervyn was enchanted.
“All the same, I would just as soon spend a quiet evening with you and Ralph,” she said. “You must not fatigue yourself on my account, dear.”
“Don’t be alarmed! I am purely selfish!” he said, going off disgusted with himself.
What had happened to him? He was unstrung—his emotions were in revolt. He felt as if he could not sit quietly at home that evening, waiting for a reply to his note. He must have change of scene, excitement, to balance him. If mammy could only know! Poor “mammy!”
Perhaps “mammy” knew more than he thought. Mrs. Mervyn, finding him changed, had certainly been on the watch these days. She had discovered no clue to the feminine influence which, woman-like, she believed to be the root of Dr. Paull’s alternate high spirits and absence of mind—still, she believed that the feminine influence was there, and that in time she would “know everything.”