“Home!” he said, with a curious smile. Then he, too, came forward a little. “I accept your advances in the same spirit, Frances.” She was holding out her hands to him with a little appeal, looking at him with eyes that sank and rose again--an emotion that was restrained by her age, by her matronly person, by the dignity of the woman, which could not be quenched by any flood of feeling. He took her hands in his with a strange timidity, hesitating, as if there might be something more, then let them drop, and they stood once again apart. “I have to thank you, too,” she said, “for bringing Constance back to me safe and well; and what is more, Edward, for this child.” She put out her hand to Frances, and drew her close, so that the girl could feel the agitation in her mother’s whole person, and knew that, weak as she was, she was a support to the other, who was so much stronger. “I owe you more thanks still for her--that she never had been taught to think any harm of her mother, that she came back to me as innocent and true as she went away.” “If you found her so, Frances, it was to her own praise, rather than mine.” “Nay,” she said with a tremulous smile, “I have not to learn now that the father of my children was fit to be trusted with a girl’s mind--more, perhaps, than their mother--and the world together.” She shook off this subject, which was too germane to the whole matter, with a little tremulous movement of her head and hands. “We must not enter on that,” she said. “Though I am only a woman of the world, it might be too much for me. Discussion must be for another time. But we may be friends.” “So far as I am concerned.” “And I too, Edward. There are things even we might consult about--without prejudice, as the lawyers say--for the children’s good.” “Whatever you wish my advice upon----” “Yes, that is perhaps the way to put it,” Lady Markham said, after a pause which looked like disappointment, and with an agitated smile. “Will you be so friendly, then,” she added, “as to dine at my house with the girls and me? No one you dislike will be there. Sir Thomas, who is in great excitement about your arrival; and perhaps Claude Ramsay, whom Constance has come back to marry.” “Then she has settled that?” “I think so; yet no doubt she would like him to be seen by you. I hope you will come,” she said, looking up at him with a smile. “It will be very strange,” he said, “to dine as a guest at your table.” “Yes, Edward; but everything is strange. We are so much older now than we were. We can afford, perhaps, to disagree, and yet be friends.” “I will come if it will give you any pleasure,” he said. “Certainly, it will give me pleasure.” She had been standing all the time, not having even been offered a seat--an omission which neither he nor she had discovered. He did it now, placing with great politeness a chair for her; but she did not sit down.