Part 2 (2/2)
”You'll be home early?”
”No--don't wait for me.”
She dropped her hands, after giving him a kiss on the cheek.
”I know where you're going! It's Madame d'Estrees' evening.”
”Well--you don't object?”
”Object?” She shrugged her shoulders. ”So long as it amuses you--You won't find _one_ woman there to-night.”
”Last time there were two,” he said, smiling, as he rose from the sofa.
”I know--Lady Quantock--and Mrs. Mallory. Now they've deserted her, I hear. What fresh gossip has turned up I don't know. Of course,” she sighed, ”I've been out of the world. But I believe there have been developments.”
”Well, I don't know anything about it--and I don't think I want to know.
She's very agreeable, and one meets everybody there.”
”_Everybody_. Ungallant creature!” she said, giving a little pull to his collar, the set of which did not please her.
”Sorry! Mother!”--his laughing eyes pursued her--”Do you want to marry me off directly?--I know you do!”
”I want nothing but what you yourself should want. Of course, you must marry.”
”The young women don't care twopence about me!”
”William!--be a bear if you like, but not an idiot!”
”Perfectly true,” he declared; ”not the dazzlers and the high-fliers, anyway--the only ones it would be an excitement to carry off.”
”You know very well,” she said, slowly, ”that now you might marry anybody.”
He threw his head back rather haughtily.
”Oh! I wasn't thinking about money, and that kind of thing. Well, give me time, mother--don't hurry me! And now I'd better stop talking nonsense, change my clothes, and be off. Good-bye, dear--you shall hear when the job's perpetrated!”
”William, really!--don't say these things--at least to anybody but me.
You understand very well”--she drew herself up rather finely--”that if I hadn't known, in spite of your apparent idleness, you would do any work they _set_ you to do, to your own credit and the country's, I'd never have lifted a finger for you!”
William Ashe laughed out.
”Oh! intriguing mother!” he said, stooping again to kiss her. ”So you admit you did it?”
He went off gayly, and she heard him flying up-stairs three steps at a time, as though he were still an untamed Eton boy, and there were no three weeks' hard political fighting behind him, and no interview which might decide his life before him.
He entered his own sitting-room on the second floor, shut the door behind him, and glanced round him with delight. It was a large room looking on a side street, and obliquely to the park. Its walls were covered with books--books which almost at first sight betrayed to the accustomed eye that they were the familiar companions of a student.
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