"Yes, dearie, it is," agreed Mrs. Welwyn with a sigh. "But it can't be helped. I'll tell you what, though. Run after that blackamoor and ask him if he has n't got a friend wants a room--a nice peaceable creature like himself. The Museum Reading-Room is full of them, Father says. Tell him to pick us a good one. Take the children up with you. Father will be in here for his breakfast in a minute."
As the door closed upon Amelia and her charges, Mrs. Welwyn crossed the room to her surviving parent's side.
"Well, Mother," she enquired cheerily, arranging the old lady's shawl, "how goes it to-day? World a bit wrong?"
The genial Mrs. Banks did not answer immediately. Obviously she was meditating a suitable repartee. Presently it came.
"When is that good-for-nothing 'usband of yours going to get up?" she enquired.
Mrs. Welwyn flushed red, but patted her cantankerous parent good-humouredly on the shoulder.
"That's all right, Mother," she said. "You mind your business and I'll mind mine. Lucius sits up very late at night, working,--long after you and I have gone to bed,--so he's entitled to a good long lay in the morning."
"Pack o' nonsense!" observed Mr. Welwyn's mother-in-law. "I'd learn 'im!"
"Good-morning, good people!"
Lucius Welwyn strode into the room with all the buoyancy and cheerfulness of a successful man of forty. As a matter of fact he was a failure of fifty-nine, but he still posed to himself with fair success as a retired man of letters. His rôle was that of the philosophic onlooker, who prefers scholarly ease and detachment to the sordid strivings of a commercial age. In reality he was an idle, shiftless, slightly dissipated, but thoroughly charming humbug. He was genuinely attached to his wife, and in his more candid moments readily and bitterly acknowledged the magnitude and completeness of his debt to her. He possessed a quick smile and considerable charm of manner; and when he was attired, not as now in a dressing-gown and slippers, but in the garments of ceremony, he still looked what he undoubtedly was--a scholar and gentleman.