"My dear Madge," her husband said—in his character of mediator and peacemaker, "you are arguing on a series of assumptions and prejudices. If Vin does hold on to his faith in those two—and if he does in the end marry Miss Bethune—I shall comfort myself with the conviction that he was likely to know more about them than anybody else. He and they have been on terms of closest intimacy, and for a long time; and you may be pretty sure that the girl Vin wants to marry is no tarnished kind of a person—in his eyes."
"Ah, yes—in his eyes!" said Lady Musselburgh, rather sadly.
"Well, his eyes are as clear as most folks’—at least, I’ve generally found them so," her husband said—trying what a little vague optimism would do.
One afternoon Vincent was walking along Piccadilly—and walking rapidly, as was his wont, for the twin purposes of exercise and economy—when he saw, some way ahead of him, Lady Musselburgh crossing the pavement to her carriage. She saw him, too, and stopped—colour mounting to her face. When he came up he merely lifted his hat, and would have kept on his way but that she addressed him.
"Vincent!" she said, in an appealing, half-reproachful fashion.
"I want you to come into the house for a few minutes—I must speak with you."
"Is there any use?" he asked, rather coldly.
However, she was very much embarrassed, as her heightened colour showed; and he could not keep her standing here in Piccadilly; he said ’Very well,’ and followed her up the steps and into the house. When they had got into the drawing-room she shut the door behind them, and began at once—with not a little piteous agitation in her manner.
"Vin, this is too dreadful! Can nothing be done? Why are you so implacable? I suppose you don’t understand what you have been to me, always, and how I have looked to your future as something almost belonging to me, something that I was to be proud of; and now that it is all likely to come true, you go and make a stranger of yourself! When I see your name in the papers, or hear you spoken of at a dinner-table—it is someone who is distant from me, as if I had no concern with him any longer. People come up to me and say ’Oh, I heard your nephew speak at the Mansion House the other afternoon,’ or ’I met your nephew at the Foreign Office last night;’ and I cannot say ’Don’t you know; he has gone and made himself a stranger to us—?’"