Inspiration came to Lord Mountry.
'I'll give him a drink,' he said.
'Yes, yes, anything. Lord Mountry, you really must go. I know I'm rude. I don't know what I'm saying. But—my boy is returning to me.'
The accumulated chivalry of generations of chivalrous ancestors acted like a spur on his lordship. He understood but dimly, yet enough to enable him to realize that a scene was about to take place in which he was most emphatically not 'on'. A mother's meeting with her long-lost child, this is a sacred thing. This was quite clear to him, so, turning like a flash, he bounded through the doorway, and, as somebody happened to be coming in at the same time, there was a collision, which left him breathing apologies in his familiar attitude of stooping to pick up his hat.
The new-comers were a tall, strikingly handsome girl, with a rather hard and cynical cast of countenance. She was leading by the hand a small, fat boy of about fourteen years of age, whose likeness to the portrait on the chair proclaimed his identity. He had escaped the collision, but seemed offended by it; for, eyeing the bending peer with cold distaste, he summed up his opinion of him in the one word 'Chump!'
Lord Mountry rose.
'I beg your pardon,' he said for perhaps the seventh time. He was thoroughly unstrung. Always excessively shy, he was embarrassed now by quite a variety of causes. The world was full of eyes—Mrs Ford's saying 'Go!' Ogden's saying 'Fool!' the portrait saying 'Idiot!' and, finally, the eyes of this wonderfully handsome girl, large, grey, cool, amused, and contemptuous saying—so it seemed to him in that feverish moment—'Who is this curious pink person who cumbers the ground before me?'
'I—I beg your pardon.' he repeated.
'Ought to look where you're going,' said Ogden severely.
'Not at all,' said the girl. 'Won't you introduce me, Nesta?'