"I cannot understand you, dear," he said, kindly; "and if you do not wish to tell what all this means leave it alone. But my hope was that you had learned to confide in me, and I am disappointed. My mother is there, do as you like about seeing her. I said you were not well."
"I am all right," she said, throwing off her depression and her penitence at once. "Go to your mother, Paul; I am sorry you said anything about my not being well, it was only a passing indisposition."
He left her not fully satisfied, but knowing it was useless to press her further.
Lady Lyons was overflowing with motherly sympathy, and fussed in a way Grace thought nearly intolerable, and which in days not so very long ago she would have ungraciously put a stop to.
But Paul's mother was to her a different person from the Lady Lyons she had known and laughed at in the old days, and she bore her attentions with all possible patience.
The trio sat down to dinner with those subdued feelings generally indicative of a past storm.
Lady Lyons resented Paul's evident want of interest in her physicians; and Grace was exhausted, and annoyed with herself for having given way as she had done; while Paul, while trying to converse with his mother, was conscious of a painful impression about his wife which he could not shake off.
The atmosphere was therefore not very clear to begin with; and poor Lady Lyons, feeling that subtle constraint that somehow had arisen between husband and wife, threw all at once an explosive just when Grace was least expecting it.
"It will interest you to hear, my dear, that before I came up here I went to see the grave of your little niece. I found it well-cared for, flowers, and all that you know."
"It does not interest me much," answered Grace, very languidly. "I never saw the poor little thing, and everything connected with that time is so hateful to me I never willingly recall it."