"I shall come here every day whilst I am in town," she declared, "and even then I am sure I shall always find something fresh to admire! I congratulate you, Mr. Haverford; you have a beautiful home!"
"My house is beautiful," he corrected; "I sometimes feel I have no home. All my tastes are for small and simple things. This is so large, so much too splendid for me. It always feel so empty...."
"Oh! but you are going to change all that," Agnes Brenton said with a little laugh.
He took her to look at the portrait of Matthew Woolgar, the work of one of the greatest of modern painters, a chef d'œuvre in its way.
"It's a living portrait," Haverford said. "Just fancy, Mrs. Brenton, I knew that man all my life, and I don't think he ever said a kind word to me. There was not the slightest sign of any sort to let me feel that he troubled himself about me one way or other." He was speaking with an effort, for all the time his thoughts were busy with the girl whom he had left in the study below. Naturally it was not a great astonishment to him to hear that his mother should be careless and indifferent to the welfare of others. The woman who could turn her back as she had done on her own little child, could not be blessed with too much sympathy or womanly thought; still, if this girl's story was true—and he saw no reason to doubt it—his mother was now guilty of a definitely cruel act, for which he failed in this moment to find any possible explanation.
"Have you a portrait of your father?" Mrs. Brenton asked, after a little while, as they wandered round.
"Yes, but not here," answered Rupert Haverford. "I have a few old photographs, but those are in my bedroom, and there is a sketch of him in water-colours in my study—that is a room downstairs," he added.
"May I see that room?" Mrs. Brenton asked.
He paused imperceptibly, and then he said in his frank way—
"I will show it to you another time. I have some one in it now."