He had let himself into the brougham as he spoke, had shut the door, and seated himself by the figure he could only dimly see sitting rather back in the corner so that little or no light fell on the face. He had kissed his mother, hardly stemming the flood of his eloquence for the purpose; and he now hardly waited for her word or two of reply before he plunged once more into eager, amusing talk. He did not give his mother time to do more than answer monosyllabically, and it followed that her silence did not strike him. He sprang out, when the carriage stopped, to give her his hand, but before he had given his instructions to the coachman, and followed her into the house, she had disappeared into the ladies’ cloak-room. Consequently it was not until she came to him as he waited to follow her into the drawing-room that he really saw her. As his eyes rested on the figure coming towards him, he suddenly saw, not it, but a sweet, white face with wistful eyes looking at him from out of a dingy frame. CHAPTER VII Always excellently dressed, Mrs. Romayne’s appearance at that moment was brilliant; almost excessively brilliant it seemed for a small dinner-party. Her frock was of the most pronounced type of full-dress, and she wore diamonds; not many, but so disposed, as was her reddish-brown hair, as to make the greatest possible effect. But the detail which had caught her son’s experienced eye, and which had brought before him by some unaccountable law of contrast that other woman’s face, lay in the fact that to-night for the first time his mother was slightly “made up.” The colour on her cheeks, the bright effectiveness of her eyes, was the result of art. It made her look haggard, Julian decided with careless, indifferent distaste; and then he was following her into the room. She had hardly paused to speak to him; apparently she imagined that they were late. They were widely separated at dinner, and were not thrown together, as it happened, during the whole evening. But Mrs. Romayne’s personality was a factor in the party not to be ignored that night; she was delightful, everybody said. It was a very select little dinner, and society romps went on afterwards; romps to which Mrs. Romayne contributed her full share. And to Julian that newly acquired sense of his mother’s artificiality was accentuated as the evening passed on into something like repugnance; a repugnance which, when he was seated with her at last in the brougham and driving home, produced in him a strong disinclination to rouse himself to an assumption of vivacity, and made him occupy himself with his own thoughts so exclusively that he never noticed that his mother uttered not a single word. “Good night, mother!” he said absently, as they stood together in the hall. He was stooping to kiss her when she stopped him with a slight, peremptory gesture.