They talked away as if there had never been the smallest break in their association; Rose and Sylvius, those nice fat twins who would be five years old next April, interested the countess immensely now that she would soon be a mother herself.
"And Sylvia?" Dorothy asked.
"Oh, my dear, we don't know. Isn't it dreadful? None of us knows. She was engaged to be married to Arthur Madden—you remember him, perhaps at the Frivolity last year—and suddenly he married another girl and Sylvia vanished—utterly and completely. She went abroad, that's all we know."
So Sylvia with all her self-assurance had not been able to escape a fall. In Dorothy's present mood it would have been unfair to say that she was glad to find that Sylvia was vulnerable, but she did feel that if she ever met Sylvia again she should perhaps get back her old affection for her more easily. And while she was thinking this about Sylvia she suddenly realized that all these other people must be feeling the same about herself.
The revival of her intimacy with Olive made a great difference to Dorothy's stay in West Kensington, and she might even have stayed on at Lonsdale Road until her baby was born had not her two married sisters turned out to be going to have babies also. Though Dorothy had never possessed a very keen sense of humor, her sense of the ridiculous had been sufficiently developed to make her feel that the sight of three young women in an interesting condition round the dining-room table of No. 17 would be a little too much of a good thing. She therefore wrote to Doctor Lane to say that she wanted her child to be born in Devonshire, and asked for his advice. He suggested that she should go to a nursing-home he knew of in Ilfracombe. Thither she went in the month of January, taking with her from Lonsdale Road that old colored supplement inscribed "Yoicks! Tally-Ho"; and there, without any of those raptures that marked her first pregnancy, but with abundant health and serenity of purpose, she waited for her time to come, and at the end of April bore a posthumous son to Clarehaven.
III
Not until her son was actually born did Dorothy apprise the dowager of the event. It was lucky that spring was already warm over France and that the sudden famine of mittens did not inconvenience the troops at this season, because the instant withdrawal of the dowager, Lady Jane, and Lady Arabella from the house in Grosvenor Square left the twenty ladies they had gathered together with neither wool to continue their good work nor with addresses to which it could be sent. The dowager in a state of perfect happiness began to trace in the lineaments of the baby a strong likeness to her dead son, and, as Dorothy had expected, to lament loudly his disinheritance; Lady Jane insisted that he must be taken at once to Chatfield, where Uncle Chat would be more than delighted to look after him entirely; Bella, who had been working herself up into a state of great excitement over a baby that Connie expected to bring into the world at the end of May, ceased to take the least interest in Connie or her child and celebrated the advent of her nephew, the sixth earl, by abandoning prose for a pæan of rhapsodic verse. As for Dorothy, she who during the months of waiting had supposed that she had at last reached that high summit of complete indifference to the world, lost nearly all her superiority, and with her strength renewed and increasing every day was on fire to secure somehow or other to her son the material prosperity that his rank demanded. She was still averse to taking him to Chatfield, because even if at such an early age it was improbable that the externals of Chatfield would make the least impression upon his character, she did not like to surrender all her fine schemes of independence at once. She compromised by consenting to take the baby to Cherrington Cottage, where his arrival elicited from their former tenants a most moving demonstration of affection for the family.
Clare Court was still vacant, and during that summer Dorothy used to wheel the perambulator of her baby round and round the domains of which he had been robbed. For his name she had gone back to her old choice of Lucius, and she felt that by doing so she was conferring upon this posthumous son the greatest compliment in her capacity. The dowager was at first a little distressed that he was not christened Anthony, but when Dorothy read to her, out of a volume of Clarendon she borrowed from the rector, that this namesake was "'a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war than that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to all posterity.' 'Thus,'" Dorothy read on, "'fell that incomparable young man, in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the true business of life that the eldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with more innocency.'"
"Yes, yes," sighed the dowager. "Dear old Tony! He was in his thirty-second year. Dear old boy!"
Dorothy looked at her mother-in-law to see if she were serious; when she saw that indeed she was she had not the heart to say that the eulogy might as a description of Tony's life be considered somewhat elevated. After all, Tony had died for his king and his country; Lord Falkland had died for his king only.