"Oh, you are too tiresome; ask nurse to explain, or Miss Winstead, when you go home. Miss Winstead, if she is wise, will tell you that you must just turn round and go the other way. You must obey me, of course, and understand that I know the right way to train you; but you are not to talk of me as though I were an angel. I am nothing of the kind. I am an ordinary woman, with ordinary feelings and ordinary faults, and I wish you to be an ordinary little girl. I am very angry with you for your great rudeness to Lord Grayleigh. What did it mean?" "Oh, mother! it meant----" Sibyl swallowed something in her throat. Her mother's speech was unintelligible; it hurt her, she did not exactly know why, but this last remark was an opening. "Mother, I am glad you spoke of it. I could not, really and truly, help it." "Don't talk nonsense. Now go away. Hortense is coming to dress me for dinner. Go." "But, mother! one minute first, please--please." "Go, Sibyl, obey me." "It was 'cos Lord Grayleigh spoke against my----" "Go, Sibyl, I won't listen to another word. I shall punish you severely if you do not obey me this instant." "I am going," said the child, "but I cannot be----" "Go. You are coming down to dessert to-night, and you are to speak properly to Lord Grayleigh. Those are my orders. Now go." Hortense came in at that moment. She entered with that slight whirl which she generally affected, and which she considered truly Parisian. Somehow, in some fashion, Sibyl felt herself swept out of the room. She stood for a moment in the passage. There was a long glass at the further end, and it reflected a pink-robed little figure. The cheeks had lost their usual tender bloom, and the eyes had a bewildered expression. Sibyl rubbed her hands across them. "I don't understand," she said to herself. "Perhaps I wasn't quite pretty enough, perhaps that was the reason, but I don't know. I think I'll go to my new nursery and sit down and think of father. Oh, I wish mother hadn't--of course it's all right, and I am a silly girl, and I get worser, not better, every day, and mother knows what is best for me; but she might have let me 'splain things. I wish I hadn't a pain here." Sibyl touched her breast with a pathetic gesture. "It's 'cos of father I feel so bad, it's 'cos they told lies of father." She turned very slowly with the most mournful droop of her head in the direction of the apartment set aside for nurse and herself. She had thought much of this visit, and now this very first afternoon a blow had come. Her mother had told her to do a hard thing. She, Sibyl, was to be polite to Lord Grayleigh; she was to be polite to that dreadful, smiling man, with the fair hair and the keen eyes, who had spoken against her father. It was unfair, it was dreadful, to expect this of her. "And mother would not even let me 'splain," thought the child.