With equally savage intent, I threw at the silence which otherwise might envelop us the statement that I had heard he had been abroad since his wife’s death. She nodded soberly. She told me that she had refused to accompany him on his now accomplished pilgrimage. She had wished him, alone and free from feminine espionage, to plunge into the mild dissipations suitable to a young gentleman of modest means. That he had done nothing of the sort, but had immediately plunged into an orgy more to his liking--had, in fact, submerged himself in the joy occasioned by his renewed fond acquaintance with the architectural masterpieces of Europe--she had gathered from his letters. “Not that his letters are frivolous, Mrs. Avery,” she explained punctiliously; they had had to do with the surface of his life, she went into it. I gathered, then, from what she merely hinted at, that behind his letters was of course what he had not told her; and that the untold had intimately to do with Eva’s last days neither his mother nor I for a moment doubted. “Mrs. Avery, you were unhappily present at the only two portentous interviews that ever took place between my daughter-in-law and myself. The stand I took I am satisfied was for my son’s best interests.” Sharply she inspected my face. Something that she denied by her manner had shaken her. She did not know how much of what she had said to Eva had been repeated to her son. She had no way of knowing what her son would think--what he did in fact think of things he might only guess. It was with apprehension, therefore, that she had come to meet him today. Herself incapable of suffering deeply except through her son, she feared what she might be about to experience through a possible devastation of his spirit. She said to me that life had resolved itself into a pattern and she could almost see where the pattern ran out. She had used to regret that she was so much older than her son, while now she had reached the point where it seemed a fortunate thing, for of the two of them she at least saw that few things happening in life were irremediable. Things came about, and they all fitted into the design, and the repeat of the pattern was the next generation, so that there might be said to be a pattern for each family. And what she did not put into words I read in her bleak eyes. One brought a son into a world that one was powerless to order for his security; one stood aside while life buffeted him; and the most that one got out of it was the realization that life is a ball tossed from hand to hand, and that hands sometimes slip but the ball is not always lost. Her lashes were pushed up by her veil in a look of astonishment.