"You are a nice thing," she said affectionately, "and I wish you were coming with me. I shall take you to the play one night." Then gathering up her skirts, she rustled softly on to the landing and disappeared. Sir Samuel's patience had evidently evaporated; he had emerged from the drawing-room, and was now expostulating. "Don't swear too audibly," Caroline heard Mrs. Lancing say, with her rippling laugh, "or you will wake the babies, and then everybody will call you a monster!" The girl's delicate brows met in a frown. Even in this far-off way she felt the arrogant familiarity of this man's manner towards Mrs. Lancing, and resented it, just as she had resented his attempt at impertinent familiarity with herself. She supposed, however, as Sir Samuel seemed to be so intimate, that he must be a connection, probably a near relative. Later on, however, when Dennis came up from her supper, and they went together through a minute examination of the children's belongings, Caroline learned casually, from the maid's chatter, that Sir Samuel Broxbourne was not really a relation--only a friend; and she found herself wondering a little why so refined and dainty a woman as Camilla should care for friendship with such a man. This was not the only matter that seemed strange and even inexplicable where Mrs. Lancing was concerned. Naturally Caroline was a novice in life as it was lived in the world in which the children's mother occupied a prominent place; she was, indeed, to a great extent ignorant of the ways and doings of everyday people (since at school she had known nothing of what passed beyond the school boundaries, and in Octavia Baynhurst's house her outlook had been even more circumscribed), so that it was no great matter for surprise if she found herself unable to understand all that passed about and around her now. But what she lacked in actual experience, in definite knowledge, was filled in by natural wit and sympathy and intuition. It needed no deep study to grasp the best and sweetest traits of so human a being as Camilla, nor was it necessary for worldly knowledge to open her eyes to the glaring faults, the amazing contrasts in this woman's character. The first time she had heard Mrs. Lancing tell a lie--quite pleasantly, and without the slightest effort or hesitation--Caroline had winced; it had been such a trivial, such a petty untruth; but what had given it importance in Caroline's eyes, accentuating the unworthiness of the act, had been the fact that both the children had been present, and that Betty had laughed at her mother's cleverness as at an excellent joke. To doubt the woman's anxious, deep-rooted love for her children was to doubt the light of the sun itself; but Caroline summed it up as a love without discrimination or any sense of real responsibility.