"I'm sorry," she said indistinctly, nervously; "but I think the children had better not stop. Cuthbert's mother is dead. She died an hour ago. Try not to let them be disappointed, Caroline. Tell them they shall see me very soon, perhaps to-morrow. It seems awfully unkind to send them away, poor little souls, but he is in a terrible state. I must be with him. It would be so miserable for the children here." Indeed the children seemed glad to go. They kissed their mother, who held them to her in a passionate, nervous kind of way, and then let Dennis put on their hats, and went away with Caroline, dancing as they went. Outside in the hot sunshine they clamoured for food. "I can smell beef," said Betty, wrinkling up her pretty nose. "I thought we was going to have a lovely dinner, and we didn't have none. Oh, Caroline, I am so hungry." And Baby chimed in with the same remark. Caroline hoisted them both into a cab, and they drove to the station. There she regaled them with lunch, and by the middle of the afternoon they were back at Yelverton. CHAPTER XVII It was of course impossible for Haverford to leave London immediately after his mother's funeral. He had to charge himself with the arrangements of her affairs, a matter in which his half-brother should have taken his share. But Cuthbert Baynhurst had hastened away as quickly as he could go. He seemed to be haunted by the dread of infection if he set foot again in the house where his mother had suffered and died. More than this, he had put into his mind the morbid fear that he had in him already the seeds of this complaint which his mother had endured in silence for so long. He was not even present at the funeral. At the time the coffin was being lowered into the ground Camilla and he were travelling in hot haste away from London, from England, from the mere possibility of breathing the air the poor dead woman had breathed. "This will be the beginning of the end," Caroline said to herself. "Her eyes may be blinded for a little while, and he may attempt to tyrannize through this power he has over her now, but Camilla is not his mother. She will tire so soon, and his selfishness has no limits." She was sitting out in the garden alone. There was a moon, and the world was wrapped about in the hush of the summer night. The children were asleep. They had been in a great excitement all day because it had suddenly been decided that there was to be a departure from the country to the sea. Mrs. Brenton had expected to have relinquished her little charges to the care of their mother, but this was now postponed indefinitely. The note Camilla had scribbled just before leaving London had touched Agnes Brenton almost in the old way. She wrote so lovingly. One could see that her heart yearned for her children, and yet that she could not separate herself from this new tie.