Lady Crawleigh picked up a pendant, head-band and bracelet of fire-opals from their scattered hiding-places on the floor, trying not to seem either too much surprised or too indifferent. Then she knelt, with a cracking of knee-joints, to search for the missing half of a pair of ear-rings. Barbara, she reflected, had evidently done one thing—or perhaps the other—or even neither; mercifully she could not do both.
"He's really no business to chop and change like that at the last moment," she complained. "What's happened?"
"He's kept in London," Barbara answered. "Don't bother to look for those things, mother; Merton will be so disappointed, if there's nothing for her to tidy. She always waits till I'm fast asleep, really tired, and then throws tepid tea at me with one hand and knocks over all the furniture with the other.... I can hardly keep my eyes open. You'll let me go to sleep, won't you?"
Lady Crawleigh scrambled to her feet and came to the side of the bed, an undignified, shrunken figure in a blue peignoir and satin slippers, with grey-black hair secured in thick short plaits.
"My child, is anything the matter?"
Barbara was lying with one bare arm over her eyes, as though the light hurt her. She had not waited to brush her hair, and the room was littered with furiously scattered clothes.
"I'm only tired," she said. "I've never known anything so hot as that place."
"Well, go to sleep." Lady Crawleigh shewed no sign of leaving the bedside. "On the whole perhaps it's just as well that he isn't coming to the Abbey. Some one was saying to-night——"
"Mother, I'm not going to marry Jack!"
Lady Crawleigh's eyes opened with innocent surprise.