"It will be very bitter to me," says Lady Rodney.
"It will not: I promise you that; only do not be too prejudiced in her disfavor. I want you to know her,—it is my greatest desire,—or I should not say another word after your last speech, which is not what I hoped to hear from you. Leighton, as you know, is out of repair, but if you will not receive us we can spend the rest of the winter at Rome or anywhere else that may occur to us."
"Of course you must come here," says Lady Rodney, who is afraid of the county and what it will say if it discovers she is at loggerheads with her son and his bride. But there is no welcome in her tone. And Geoffrey, greatly discouraged, yet determined to part friends with her for Mona's sake,—and trusting to the latter's sweetness to make all things straight in the future,—after a few more desultory remarks takes his departure, with the understanding on both sides that he and his wife are to come to the Towers on the Friday following to take up their quarters there until Leighton Hall is ready to receive them.
With mingled feelings he quits his home, and all the way up to London in the afternoon train weighs with himself the momentous question whether he shall or shall not accept the unwilling invitation to the Towers, wrung from his mother.
To travel here and there, from city to city and village to village, with Mona, would be a far happier arrangement. But underlying all else is a longing that the wife whom he adores and the mother whom he loves should be good friends.
Finally, he throws up the mental argument, and decides on letting things take their course, telling himself it will be a simple matter to leave the Towers at any moment, should their visit there prove unsatisfactory. At the farthest, Leighton must be ready for them in a month or so.
Getting back to the Grosvenor, he runs lightly up the stairs to the sitting-room, and, opening the door very gently,—bent in a boyish fashion on giving her a "rise,"—enters softly, and looks around for his darling.
At the farthest end of the room, near a window, lying back in an arm-chair, lies Mona, sound asleep.
One hand is beneath her cheek,—that is soft and moist as a child's might be in innocent slumber,—the other is thrown above her head. She is exquisite in her abandon, but very pale, and her breath comes unevenly.
Geoffrey, stooping over to wake her with a kiss, marks all this, and also that her eyelids are tinged with pink, as though from excessive weeping.