"My darling," she said, with a certain hesitation, "I will gladly have them if you wish it—only you remember what happened long ago when Helen was here last?"
"Yes, I know, I was afraid you would think of that. But you can put that aside. Helen's not the smallest recollection of it. She told me so this afternoon."
"Told you so?" Katherine repeated.
"Yes," he said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would have been impossible."
There was a pause. Lady Calmady rose. The young man spoke with conviction, yet her anxiety was not altogether allayed.
"Impossible," he repeated. "Pretty mother don't disquiet yourself. Trust me. To tell you the truth I have felt to-day—is it very foolish?—that I should like some one of my own age for a little while, as—don't you know—a playfellow."
Katherine bent down and kissed him. But mother-love is not, even in its most self-sacrificing expression, without torments of jealousy.
"My dear, you shall have your playfellow," she said, though conscious of a tightening of the muscles of her beautiful throat. "Good-night. Sleep well."
She went out, closing the door behind her. The perspective of the dimly-lighted corridor, and the great hall beyond, struck her as rather sadly lifeless and silent. What wonder, indeed, that Richard should ask for a companion, for something young! Love made her selfish and cowardly she feared. She should have thought of this before. She turned back, again opening the Gun-Room door.
Richard had raised himself. He stood on the seat of the chair, steadying himself by one hand on the chair-back, while with the other he pulled the rug from beneath the sleepy bull-dog.