'There is no need. Kiss me, mother, and bid me good-night. I shall like to be with my own self in the darkness. There, another kiss; now go, or we shall both be frozen;' and Audrey gently pushed her to the door.
'She would not let me stop with her, John!' exclaimed Mrs. Ross, as she entered her husband's dressing-room. 'She is very calm: unnaturally so, I thought; she hardly cried at all; she is thinking nothing of herself, only of him.'
'Do you know it is one o'clock, Emmie?' returned her husband rather shortly. He was tired and sore, poor man, and in no mood to hear of his daughter's sufferings. 'The deuce take the woman!' he said to himself fretfully, as Mrs. Ross meekly turned away without another word; but he was certainly not alluding to his wife when he spoke. 'From the days of Eve they have always been in some mischief or other'—from which it may be deduced that Mrs. Ross was not so far wrong when she thought her husband was threatened with gout, only his malaise was more of the mind. He was thinking of the interview that awaited him on the morrow. 'I would as lief cut off my right hand as tell him that he must not have Audrey,' he said to himself, as he laid his head on the pillow.
Now, as Michael lay awake through the dark hours revolving many things in his uneasy brain, it occurred to him that he would send a note across to Cyril as soon as he heard the household stirring, and he carried out this resolution in spite of drowsiness and an aching head.
'My Dear Blake,' he wrote,
'Don't bother yourself about early school. I am on the spot, and can easily take your place. You will want to pull yourself together, and under the circumstances the boys would be an awful nuisance. I hope you have got some sleep.
'Yours,
'M. O. Burnett.'
To this came the following reply, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper:
'Thanks awfully; will accept your offer. Please tell Dr. Ross that I will come across to him soon after ten.'