"You'll be a good child, my pet, I know. If only your mother had been spared to us, there would never have been any little difficulties. You must talk to Cousin Ethel, if there's anything she can help you about——"
"But there isn't anything——" Lily was frenziedly repudiating she knew not what.
"Well, well, we needn't talk of sad, uncomfortable things, my child. Only no little hole-and-corner affairs with letter-writing, remember."
But Lily had ceased to derive relief from the evident immunity from detection of the toffee scandal that was thus implied.
Her idle dreaming about that impalpable summer romance was over, and she strove with shame to forget the very name of Colin Eastwood.
VII
"You must have a talk with Ethel, have a talk with Ethel," said Charlie Hardinge. "My dear fellow, you must have a talk with Ethel."
Philip looked gloomy and distrustful.
He did not tell himself that Ethel Hardinge always roused in him a feeling of irritation that temporarily embraced the whole family of Hardinge, nor did he realize that she had a precisely similar effect upon most of those people who, with reluctant admiration, spoke of her as being such a good mother.