Now, finding the room empty, and knowing it to be four minutes after ten, she says to herself, "The first!" with a little surprise and much pardonable pride, and seats herself with something of an air before the militant urn. When we are old it is so sweet to us to be younger than the young, when we are young it is so sweet to us to be just vice versa. Oh, foolish youth!
An elderly butler, who has evidently seen service (in every sense of the word), and who is actually steeped in respectability up to his port-wine nose, hovers around the breakfast, adjusting this dish affectionately, and straightening that, until all is carefully awry, when he leaves the room with a sigh of satisfaction.
Perhaps Lady Chetwoode's self-admiration would have grown beyond bounds, but that just at this instant voices in the hall distract her thoughts. The sounds make her face brighten and bring a smile to her lips. "The boys" are coming. She draws the teacups a little nearer to her and makes a gentle fuss over the spoons. A light laugh echoes through the hall; it is answered and then the door once more opens, and her two sons enter, Cyril, being the youngest, naturally coming first.
On seeing his mother he is pleased to make a gesture indicative of the most exaggerated surprise.
"Now, who could have anticipated it?" he says. "Her gracious majesty already assembled, while her faithful subjects—— Well," with a sudden change of tone, "for my part I call it downright shabby of people to scramble down-stairs before other people merely for the sake of putting them to the blush."
"Lazy boy! no wonder you are ashamed of yourself when you look at the clock," says Lady Chetwoode, smiling fondly as she returns his greeting.
"Ashamed! Pray do not misunderstand me. I have arrived at my twenty-sixth year without ever having mastered the meaning of that word. I flatter myself I am a degree beyond that."
"Last night's headache quite gone, mother?" asks Sir Guy, bending over her chair to kiss her; an act he performs tenderly, and as though the doing of it is sweet to him.
"Quite, my dear," replies she; and there is perhaps the faintest, the very faintest, accession of warmth in her tone, an almost imperceptible increase of kindliness in her smile as she speaks to her eldest son.
"That's right," says he, patting her gently on the shoulder; after which he goes over to his own seat and takes up the letters lying before him.