CHAPTER LVII.
HAVING IT OUT.
Lucy had taken rooms for her mother in an unpretentious square in Bloomsbury, and Mr Reynolds had gladly agreed to spend his short summer holiday with his wife and daughter in London. Dr Alice Bateson had called the day after their arrival, and had gone into the case very thoroughly.
"There is no doubt that your mother must have an operation," she had said to Lucy, in her brusque fashion, "but it is nothing that need make you unhappy. So far as one can see, the chances are all in her favour, and she will be a different being when it is over. I would like her to rest, and take a tonic for a week or so, in order to get up her strength as much as possible; but I should not advise her to postpone it any longer than that."
Lucy was in great spirits. "What say you to that, Daddy," she cried, "as the first-fruits of your investment in me? We shall see Mother on the top of Snowdon before the summer is over."
"I think we shall be glad to rest content with something short of that," he said, smiling, and stroking his wife's soft hair.
The operation was successfully accomplished in due course, and as soon as Mrs Reynolds was well on the way to recovery, Lucy insisted on taking her father about "to see something of life," as she expressed it.
"I thought I knew the full extent of your aunt's fascination," she said to Mona, when the latter came in one day with a basket of hothouse fruit for the invalid, "but I do wish you had seen her with Father when we called. She was a perfect woman, and a perfect child. He was awfully impressed—thinks in his heart that she is thrown away on Sir Douglas, which, in the immortal words of Euclid, is absurd. Lady Munro told me afterwards that Father made her wish she could go back and live her life all over again. 'It is so strange,' she said, with exquisite frankness, 'that he should be your father!' '"Degeneration, a Chapter on Darwinism,'"—in fact?' I suggested; but she only smiled sweetly and said, 'What do you mean, child?'"
"Was Sir Douglas at home?"
"He came in for a few minutes at the end. He and my father got on all right. Of course they only met as——" she paused.
"Of course—as two men of the world."