"Paris! Have you been with that son of mine?" she asked sharply.
Micky coloured. "I met him--quite by chance, though. We were not together more than a few minutes."
"Have you got tired of him at last, then?" she asked. She moved over to the fire. She looked back at Micky quizzically. "I have often wondered how you put up with his friendship so long, Mr. Mellowes," she added rather sadly.
Micky felt embarrassed. He had always liked Mrs. Ashton. He stammered out that he and Raymond had always been very good friends.
She drew her chair a little closer to the fire.
"Very well--then, perhaps, you will be kind enough to answer a question I am going to ask you. Mr. Mellowes, what was the name of that girl at Eldred's whom Raymond was always about with before Christmas?"
The question was so unexpected that Micky was utterly taken aback. Before he was aware of it he had told a lie.
"I don't know--at least, he always spoke of her as 'Lallie.' I never once saw him with her, Mrs. Ashton--he never introduced me to her."
"And yet you were such friends," she said.
"Our tastes were not always identical," he said rather stiffly. "I am not very interested in women, and he----"
"And he is," she finished for him. "There is no need to tell me that--I know my son. So you cannot tell me the name of this girl? I had hoped that you would be able to do so."
"I dare say I could find out," he said. "If she is still at Eldred's."
"She is not there." Mrs. Ashton looked up at Micky with an anxious line between her handsome eyes. "Mr. Mellowes, I have always prided myself on my sense of justice, and somehow lately I have got an uncomfortable feeling that when I forbade Raymond to have anything more to do with that girl it would have been better if I had advised her to have nothing more to do with him. He is my son, and perhaps it seems strange for me to speak about him like that, but you cannot have been friends with him all these months without finding him out, so I need not apologise. Raymond is just his father over again...." She paused, and a painful little smile curved her lips.
She looked at Micky rather pathetically. "There is no need for me to say any more, is there?" she asked.
Micky did not answer. He had heard many stories about Raymond's father, all more or less unsavoury, and he knew that from all accounts Mrs. Ashton had been greatly to be pitied during his lifetime.
