Mrs. Peyton’s smile faded, and laying a detaining hand on his, she said with sudden directness: “Sure of you, or of your success?”
He hesitated. “Oh, she regards them as synonymous. She thinks I’m bound to get on.”
“But if you don’t?”
He shrugged laughingly, but with a slight contraction of his confident brows. “Why, I shall have to make way for some one else, I suppose. That’s the law of life.”
Mrs. Peyton sat upright, gazing at him with a kind of solemnity. “Is it the law of love?” she asked.
He looked down on her with a smile that trembled a little. “My dear romantic mother, I don’t want her pity, you know!”
Dick, coming home the next morning shortly before daylight, left the house again after a hurried breakfast, and Mrs. Peyton heard nothing of him till nightfall. He had promised to be back for dinner, but a few moments before eight, as she was coming down to the drawing-room, the parlour-maid handed her a hastily pencilled note.
“Don’t wait for me,” it ran. “Darrow is ill and I can’t leave him. I’ll send a line when the doctor has seen him.”
Mrs. Peyton, who was a woman of rapid reactions, read the words with a pang. She was ashamed of the jealous thoughts she had harboured of Darrow, and of the selfishness which had made her lose sight of his troubles in the consideration of Dick’s welfare. Even Clemence Verney, whom she secretly accused of a want of heart, had been struck by Darrow’s ill looks, while she had had eyes only for her son. Poor Darrow! How cold and self-engrossed he must have thought her! In the first rush of penitence her impulse was to drive at once to his lodgings; but the infection of his own shyness restrained her. Dick’s note gave no details; the illness was evidently grave, but might not Darrow regard her coming as an intrusion? To repair her negligence of yesterday by a sudden invasion of his privacy might be only a greater failure in tact; and after a moment of deliberation she resolved on sending to ask Dick if he wished her to go to him.