“The old lady?” repeated Captain Palliser.
“I mean her mother. The one that's the Countess of Mallowe.”
“Have you met Lady Mallowe?” Palliser inquired with a not wholly repressed smile. A vision of Lady Mallowe over-hearing their conversation arose before him.
“No, I haven't. What's she like?”
“She is not the early-or mid-Victorian old lady,” was Palliser's reply. “She wears Gainsborough hats, and looks a quite possible eight and thirty. She is a handsome person herself.”
He was not aware that the term “old lady” was, among Americans of the class of Mrs. Bowse's boarders, a sort of generic term signifying almost anything maternal which had passed thirty.
Tembarom proceeded.
“After they get through at the Asshawe Holt place, I've asked them to come here.”
“Indeed,” said Palliser, with an inward start. The man evidently did not know what other people did. After all, why should he? He had been selling something or other in the streets of New York when the thing happened, and he knew nothing of London.
“The countess called on Miss Alicia when we were in London,” he heard next. “She said we were relations.”