Upon a day on which the trees and hedges were again frocked in spring finery in honour of approaching summer, Mrs Devitt was sitting with her sister in the drawing-room of Melkbridge House. Mrs Devitt was trying to fix her mind on an article in one of the monthly reviews dealing with the voluntary limitation of families on the part of married folk. Mrs Devitt could not give her usual stolid attention to her reading, because, now and again, her thoughts wandered to an interview between her husband and Lowther which was taking place in the library downstairs. This private talk between father and son was on the subject of certain snares which beset the feet of moneyed youth when in London, and in which the unhappy Lowther had been caught. Mrs Devitt was sufficiently vexed at the prospect of her husband having to fork out some hundreds of pounds, without the further promise of revelations in which light-hearted, lighter living young women were concerned. Debts were forgivable, perhaps excusable, in a young gentleman of Lowther's standing, but immorality, in Mrs Devitt's eyes, was a horse of quite another colour; anything of this nature acted upon Mrs Devitt's susceptibilities much in the same way as seeing red afreets an angry bull.
Miss Spraggs, whom the last eighteen months had aged in appearance, looked up from the rough draft of a letter she was composing.
"Did you hear anything?" she asked, as she listened intently.
"Hear what?"
"The door open downstairs. Lowther's been in such a time with Montague."
"I suppose Lowther is confessing everything," sighed Mrs Devitt.
"Nothing of the sort," remarked Miss Spraggs.
"What do you mean?"
"No one ever does confess everything: something is always kept back."
"Don't you think, Eva, you look at things from a very material point of view?"