She smiled faintly. "I am to be always here, to look after the place when he and Sarah are travelling or in London. I am to live with his aunts. He wants to be able to think of me as always waiting here to welcome him home, as—as I have been all his life. Not actually in this house, because—Sarah—my little Sarah—wouldn't like that, it seems; but in the Dower House, close by."
"I see," said John. "How delightfully ingenuous, and how pleasingly unselfish a very young man can sometimes be!"
"Ah! don't laugh at me, John," she said tremulously. "Indeed, just now, I cannot bear it."
"Laugh at you, my queen—my saint! How little you know me!" said John, tenderly. "It was at Peter that I was presuming to smile."
"Is it a laughing matter?" she said wistfully.
"I think it will be, Mary."
"I tried so hard to tell him," said Lady Mary, "but I couldn't.
Somehow he made it impossible. He looks upon me as quite, quite old."
John laughed outright. A laugh that rang true even to Lady Mary's sensitive perceptions.
"But didn't you look upon everybody over thirty as, quite old when you were one-and-twenty? I'm sure I did."
"Perhaps. But yet—I don't know. I am his mother. It is natural he should feel so. He made me realize how preposterous it was for me, the mother of a grown-up son, to be thinking selfishly of my own happiness, as though I were a young, fresh girl just starting life."