“Mr. Loring!” she said at last, and there was an almost bewildered remonstrance in her low, astonished tone. “My dear Mr. Loring!” “One moment,” he interposed quickly. “Of course, I don’t ask you to look upon it as anything but a question of expediency and mutual goodwill and esteem. We are both of us very well aware that London is not Arcadia! You won’t consider it brutal frankness on my part, I’m sure, if I tell you that from a financial point of view our positions are not unequal. I have been exceptionally fortunate lately, and I can offer you an income of about five thousand a year. And if a man’s assistance and support counts for something in your life, as I hope it may----” Mrs. Romayne interrupted him. With all the tact and practicality of a woman of the world, she had mastered her amazement and was mistress of the situation. She spoke kindly and composedly, with just that touch of delicate concern which the occasion demanded. “Don’t say any more, please; it is really quite impossible.” A sudden flash of surprise passed across Marston Loring’s face, and he paused a moment, his keen eyes fixed scrutinisingly on her face. He was trying to detect there some signs of that coquetry or affectation of reluctance which he believed must surely underlie her words. His scrutiny failed to detect anything of the kind, however, and an unpleasant glitter came into his eyes. “Impossible is a rather curt word,” he said. “May I ask you to amplify it?” He saw the colour rise beneath her paint as she answered: “I have not the faintest intention of marrying, in the first place. And even if there were not innumerable other reasons against what you propose, I’m afraid I have no fancy for making myself ridiculous! Oh, of course I am well aware”--she laughed a little--“that in my capacity of silly old mother I am as ridiculous as any woman need be! But really, I cannot add another farcical part to that farcical rôle.” “And that farcical part would be----?” enquired Loring. “That of the old wife of a young husband,” she answered, with artificial mirth. “Mr. Loring, I am really sorrier, if you are indeed disappointed, than I can tell you. If you have thought that I encouraged you---- But that is too utterly preposterous! I have considered you simply as my son’s friend--almost my son’s contemporary--a young man with an exceptionally wise and reliable head. Certainly not as a young man who would be foolish enough to want to marry a woman old enough to be his mother.” Loring’s lips were rather thin, and his eyes glittered dangerously. As she stood looking at him then, with a certain softening excitement about her face, there was no slightest suggestion of age about her; nothing but an admirably developed and preserved maturity. And Loring was a young man in nothing but years.