"Yes, for that much anyhow," Grantley agreed, pressing his arm in a friendly way. "And now, old boy, good-night." Jeremy left him there in the garden smoking his cigarette, standing motionless. His face was in the dark now, but Jeremy knew the same look was in the eyes still. It was hard for the young man, even with the new impulses and the new sympathies that were alive and astir within him, to follow, or even to conjecture, what had been happening that night. Yet as he went down the hill it was plain even to him, plain enough to raise a sharp pang in him, that somehow the little child, unborn or whether it should yet be born, had brought not union, but estrangement to the house; not peace but a sword. CHAPTER VII A VINDICATION OF CONSCIENCE It was a dull chilly afternoon in March. Christine Fanshaw huddled her slight little figure--she looked as if the cold would cut right through her--over a blazing fire in her boudoir. She held a screen between the flames and her face, and turned her eyes on Anna Selford, who was paying her a call. Anna was a plump dark girl, by no means pretty, but with a shrewd look about her and an air of self-confidence rather too assured for her years; she was dressed in a would-be artistic fashion, not well suited to her natural style. "Awfully sad, isn't it?" she was saying. "But mamma says Mrs. Raymore is splendid about it. Mr. Raymore was quite upset, and was no good at all at first. It was Mrs. Raymore who went and got Charley away from the woman, and hushed up all the row about the money--oh, he had taken some from the office: he was in a solicitor's office, you know--and arranged for him to be sent out to Buenos Ayres--did the whole thing in fact. She's quite heart-broken about it, mamma says, but quite firm and brave too. How awful to have your son turn out like that! He was only nineteen, and Mrs. Raymore simply worshipped him." "He used to be a very pretty little boy. A little boy! And now!" Christine plucked idly at the fringes of her hand-screen. "And mamma says the woman was thirty, and not very good-looking either!" "What a lot you know, Anna! You're hardly seventeen, are you? And Suzette Bligh's twenty-seven! But she's a baby compared to you." "Oh, mamma always tells me things--or else I hear her and papa talking about them. When I'm washing the dogs, they forget I'm there, especially if they're squabbling at all. And I keep my ears open." "Yes, I think you do." "But generally mamma tells me. She always must talk to somebody, you see. When I was little she used to tell me things, and then forget it and box my ears for knowing them!" Anna spoke without rancour; rather with a sort of quiet amusement, as though she had given much study to her mother's peculiarities and found permanent diversion in them. "Poor Kate Raymore! So they're in trouble too!" "Charley was awfully sorry; and they hope he'll come back some day, if he behaves well out there."