“We’ll go home again to-morrow,” soothingly declared Nina, who was tired of Lady Cotton’s unappreciative adulation and also hated being asked to “give a little music” every evening after dinner.
“Mother! how you understand!” cried Morris in a sudden rush of gratitude.
Nina looked at her son with liquid eyes.
He let her take his hand for a moment, gave hers a squeeze that drove the stones of her rings into her fingers, and dashed out of the room.
Nina unavoidably devoted an intense second or two to the absorbing pain in her fingers, but did so, as it were, in parenthesis. At the earliest possible moment she had recovered herself, and was murmuring softly: “My little son!” She saw Morris as a baby boy again, and at the same time clearly visualized her present self indulging in this tender illusion.
“Such a little boy,” murmured Nina again, her uninjured hand hovering with a touching, instinctive sort of gesture about two feet from the ground.
The same rapt look of retrospective tenderness tinged and irradiated Mrs. Severing’s rather elusive and sketchy explanations of her hostess and carried her serenely past the loud and affectionate reproaches that assailed her up to the very moment of farewell.
“I hate to leave you,” she sighed, “but you must come and see my Cornish home one day—soon.”
She stepped into the little car, swathed in the most becoming of amber coloured veils, and remarked to Morris almost as they left the hall-door:
“Not that anything would ever induce me to have either of them inside my house.”