Mrs. Methven looked at him in astonishment. "I thought—" she said, "you remember how fantastic you thought it, and mediæval—that you had to make a periodical visit to the old home of the race?"
His very lips trembled with irritation. He had written about all that in the first days of his absence, and even after his arrival at Loch Houran, making fun of the old world stipulation. She might have divined, he thought, that it was a very different matter now. "I am sorry to keep you so long here, out of your own comfortable corner," he said. "You never like sitting in the dining-room. It is brutal of me to keep you here."
"No, Walter, it is my pleasure," she cried; then, poor soul, with that most uncalled-for, unprofitable desire for information, "And there are so many things I want to know——"
He commanded himself with a great effort. "Mother," he said, "I have not enjoyed my visit to Scotland. There are a great many things that perhaps I may be able to talk of hereafter if you will give me time, but that I don't want even to think of now. And I'm tired with my journey; and everything is not couleur de rose, as you seem to think. Let me alone, if you can, for to-night."
"Let you alone—if I can!" She was so startled, so bitterly disappointed, that for a moment or two she could not speak. And this aggravated Walter still more.
"Mother," he cried, getting up from his unsatisfactory meal, "I hope you are not going to make a scene the first night."
Thus, without any intention, with indeed the strongest desire to adopt a better way, this was how young Lord Erradeen resumed his intercourse with his mother. And yet Oona's mother, with all her little gentle affectations, with her kind effusiveness which there was no withstanding, had given him the sincerest sense of home and a refuge from trouble. Was it Oona's presence that explained all, or was there something more subtle underneath? There followed on this occasion no scene; but when Mrs. Methven returned to the drawing-room alone, leaving Walter, as she said, in peace to smoke his cigar after his dinner, Miss Merivale's keen eyes perceived at once that the traveller's meal had not been a happy ceremonial.
"I dare say he is tired," she said.
"Yes, he is tired—almost too tired to eat. Smoke is the grand panacea," said Mrs. Methven, with a smile.
"The worst of smoke is that it is so unsociable," said Miss Merivale, cheerfully, picking up her book. "I think I'll go to bed and leave you free for your talk with Walter when the cigar's done. Oh yes, you will get on better by yourselves. You will get more out of him if you are alone. But I dare say you won't get very much out of him. It will come by scraps—a little at a time; and he will be quite astonished that you don't know—by instinct, I suppose. Men are all like that."