For one moment Lady Dromard fancied that the sneer was for the colonials, and it surprised her; the next, she took it to herself, and very meekly for so proud a heart.
"My dear boy!" she murmured indulgently. "Apart from their people, these girls—for the married one is as young as she has any right to be—strike one as fresh, and free, and pleasing. And they are ladies. Am I to believe that the majority out there are like them?"
Manister shrugged his shoulders.
"That's as you please, my dear mother. These people didn't strike me as the only decent ones in Melbourne. I did meet others."
The countess tapped her foot upon the fender, and took counsel with her own reflection in the mirror, for she was standing before the fireplace while her son wandered about the room—her son with the reputation for a childlike devotion to his mother. There had been little of that sort of devotion since his return from Australia. Nothing between them was as it had been before. This bitter coldness had been his domestic manner—his manner with her, of all people—longer than the mother could bear. She knew the reason; she had tried to tell him so; she had tried to speak freely to him of the whole matter—even penitently, if he would. But he had never spoken freely to her; and once he had refused to speak at all, thence or thenceforth. Lady Dromard had made a resolve then which she remembered now.
"Really, Harry, I can't make you out," she said lightly at length. "You knock down the colonials with one hand, and you set them up with the other, as though they were so many ninepins. I am puzzled to know what you really mean, and what you mean satirically. You never used to be satirical, Harry! I should like to know whether you really approve of these people, or whether you don't."
"I do approve of them," said Lord Manister, halting on the rug before his mother. "I won't put it more strongly. But I am glad that you should have seen there are such things as ladies in Australia!"
Their eyes met, and the mother forgot her resolve; for he had raised the subject himself, and for the first time.
"You think of her still!" whispered Lady Dromard.
"Of course I do," returned Manister, roughly; and again he was striding about the room.