“I am so glad to see you, mamma, and looking so well. No, not home-sick, precisely, dear mother, but penetrated with the folly of staying there, where nothing was ever doing, when I might have been in the centre of everything: which is saying much the same thing, though in different words.”
“In very different words,” said Lady Markham, resuming her seat with a smile. “I see you have not changed at all, Con. Will you have any tea? And did you leave—your home there—with as little ceremony as you left me!”
“May I help myself, mamma? don’t you trouble. It is very nice to see your pretty china, instead of Frances’ old bizarre cups, which were much too good for me. Oh, I did not leave my—home. I—brought it back with me.”
“You brought——?”
“My father with me, mamma.”
“Oh!” Lady Markham said. She was too much astonished to say more.
“Perhaps it was because he got very tired of me, and thought there was no other way of getting rid of me; perhaps because he was tired of it himself. He came at last like a lamb. I did not really believe it till we were on the boat, and Algy Muncastle turned up, and I introduced him to my father. You should have seen how he stared.”
“Oh!” said Lady Markham again; and then she added faintly: “Is—is he here?”
“You mean papa? I left him at aunt Caroline’s. In the circumstances, that seemed the best thing to do.”
Lady Markham leaned back in her chair; she had become very pale. One shock after another had reduced her strength. She closed her eyes while Constance very comfortably sipped her tea. It was not possible that she could have dreamed it or imagined it, when, on opening her eyes again, she saw Constance sitting by the tea-table with a plate of bread and butter before her. “I have really,” she explained seriously, “eaten nothing to-day.”