“What a ridiculous woman!” she said half aloud, with just the intonation she had used in speaking to Lady Bracondale of her “little surprises” for “her boy.” “And what a spoilt fellow!” She turned away, went out of the room, with one backward glance as she closed the door, and upstairs to the drawing-room. She had just entered the room when a thought seemed to strike her. “How utterly ridiculous!” she said to herself. “I quite forgot to notice whether there were any letters!” She was just crossing the room to ring for a servant when the front-door bell rang vigorously and she stopped short. With an exclamation of surprise she went to the door and stood there listening, that she might prepare herself beforehand for the possible visitor, for whom she evidently had no desire. “How tiresome!” she said to herself. “Who is it, I wonder?” She heard the parlourmaid go down the hall and open the door. “Mrs. Romayne at home?” With a shock and convulsion, which only the wildest leap of the heart can produce, the listening face in the drawing-room doorway, with the conventional smile which might momently be called for just quivering on it, half in abeyance, half in evidence, was suddenly transformed. Every trace of artificiality fell away, blotted out utterly before the swift, involuntary flash of mother love and longing with which those hard blue eyes, those pretty, superficial little features were, in that instant, transfigured. The elaborately dressed figure caught at the door-post, as any homely drudge might have done; the woman of the world, startled out of--or into--herself, forgot the world. “It’s Julian!” the white, trembling lips murmured. “Julian!” As she spoke the word, up the stairs two steps at a time, there dashed a tall, fair-haired young man who caught her in his arms with a delighted laugh--her own laugh, but with a boyish ring of sincerity in it. “I’ve taken you by surprise, mother!” he cried. “You’ve never opened my telegram!” CHAPTER VIII Mrs. Romayne had been left, eighteen years before, absolutely penniless. When Dennis Falconer took her back from Nice to her uncle’s home in London, she had returned to that house wholly dependent, for herself and for her little five-year-old boy, on the generosity she would meet with there. Fortunately old Mr. Falconer was a rich man. There had been a good deal of money in the Falconer family, and as its representatives decreased in number, that money had collected itself in the hands of a few survivors.