"Confound his precocity," grumbled the musician; "what is one to do with a son like that? Besides, I can't tell him myself; how _do_ they know?"
"They don't," said Lady Joan, promptly; "it's a fact I used to dispute with my governess in my youth. It is only we who take it upon ourselves to say that they do; we have no means of proving it. The sheep takes them as they come, and looks equally bored with them all."
Digby laughed loudly, and Norah murmured something in a pained voice about maternal instinct.
"All nonsense, my dear," persisted Lady Joan, gayly; "no amount of maternal instinct could help a sheep to tell her own lamb from any other sheep's lamb. Besides, why should she want to? As it is, she can have a change without being called fickle. Happy sheep!"
Sonny was standing with his legs very wide apart and his blue eyes fixed on her face, as she said this.
"Auntie Joan's pertending," he said solemnly. The others laughed, which awoke the slumbering baby again; and Norah, after complaining between its wails that the draught under the bedroom door was answerable for everything, carried it upstairs again by way of curing it.
"Well, what is it?" said the musician, in the peace that ensued on his wife's departure; and he lighted his cigarette and looked across at Lady Joan.
"How did you know there was anything?" she asked.
"I always know," he said, in a superior tone; "we haven't been chums all these years for nothing. Tell me what's up, dear. Hasn't Jack been writing to you, the scamp?"
"Oh, yes. He always writes. He is quite good. _I_ am the naughty one; I always have been, I think. I am not fit to be engaged; it is true what I told you--that day."
They were very fond of making allusions to _that day_; they told themselves it was one of the privileges of their friendship, now that _she_ was safely engaged and _he_ was securely married, to mention subjects which were not always even respectable; it did not occur to them that this constant renewal of back chapters in their lives had more to do with their egoism than their friendship.
"And what dreadful thing have you been doing now, please?" asked Digby.
She flung back her head and laughed mockingly, as she used to do.
"Do you remember telling me that marriage was the only way out of it? I am half inclined to agree with you now, though I wrote to Jack yesterday to break off our engagement. That is all."