Mrs Gaunt dried her eyes. She was a simple-minded woman, who knew what she wanted, and whose instinct taught her to refuse a stone when it was offered to her instead of bread. She said, “He will forgive you, Miss Waring; he will not think hardly of you, you may be sure. They are too infatuated to do that, when a girl like you takes the trouble to---- But I think you might have thought twice before you did it, knowing what you tell me now. A young man fresh from India, where he has been working hard for years--coming home to get up his strength, to enjoy himself a little, to make up for all his long time away---- And because you are a little lonely, and want to enjoy his--friendship, as you say, you go and spoil his holiday for him, make it all wretched, and make even his poor mother wish that he had never come home at all. And you think it will all be made up if you say you are sorry at the end! To him, perhaps, poor foolish boy; but oh, not to me.” Constance made no reply to this. She had done her best, and for a moment she thought she had succeeded; but she had always been aware, by instinct, that the mother was less easy to beguile than the son; and she was silent, attempting no further self-defence. “Young men are a mystery to me,” said Mrs Gaunt, standing with agitated firmness in the middle of the loggia, taking no notice of the chair which had been offered her. She did not even look at Constance, but directed her remarks to the swaying palms in the foreground and the hills behind--“they are a mystery! There may be one under their very eyes that is as good as gold and as true as steel, and they will never so much as look at her. And there will be another that thinks of nothing but amusing herself, and that is the one they will adore. Oh, it is not for the first time now that I have found it out! I had my misgivings from the very first; but he was like all the rest--he would not hear a word from his mother; and now I am sure I wish his furlough was at an end; I wish he had never come home. His father and I would rather have waited on and pined for him, or even made up our minds to die without seeing him, rather than he should have come here to break his heart.” She paused a moment and then resumed again, turning from the palms and distant peaks to concentrate a look of fire upon Constance, who sat sunk in her wicker chair, turning her head away. “And if a man were to go astray after being used like that, whose fault would it be? If he were to go wrong--if he were to lose heart, to say What’s the good? whose fault would it be? Oh, don’t tell me that you didn’t know what you were doing--that you didn’t mean to break his heart! Did you think he had no heart at all? But then, why should you have taken the trouble? It wouldn’t have amused you, it would have been no fun, had he had no heart.” “You seem,” said Constance, without turning her head, launching a stray arrow in self-defence, “to know all about it, Mrs Gaunt.”