Mrs. Carew was truly embarrassed at the sight of her creditor, but she continued to play lightly among the hymns, and gave him up to the children. But Fairfax was too desperate to be set aside. If there was any comfort anywhere he was going to have it. He said to his aunt in a voice deepened by feeling-- "Aunt Caroline, I'm a little down on my luck." The lady turned her doe-like eyes on her nephew. "My dear Tony...." He clenched his vigorous hands to keep down his emotion. "Yes. Cedersholm has turned his back on me, as far as I can see." With a short laugh he threw off his intense mood, thoroughly ashamed of his weakness. "_Our_ branch of the family, Aunt Caroline, are unlucky all round, I reckon." There was one thought uppermost in his aunt's mind. _She had no money with which to pay her debt to him._ When there weren't lamps to buy there were rugs and figures of _biscuit_ Venuses bending over _biscuit_ streams. She had confessed her vice; she "adored bric-a-brac." The jumble in her mind made her eyes more vague than ever. "Will you go back South?" she wondered. He started, spread out his empty hands. "Go back to mother like this? Auntie!" As ineffectual as she had been on the night of his arrival, so now Mrs. Carew sat ineffectual before his crisis. She breathed, "My poor boy!" and her fingers strayed amongst the keys and found the melody of the song he loved so much. The young traveller at her side was too much of a man, even in his state of despair, to have expected a woman to lift his burden. If she did, he did not think of the money she owed him. What he wanted was a soothing touch to be laid on his heart, and the song in which, not six weeks before, he had nearly loved his aunt, did what she did not. The children had gone upstairs. Mrs. Carew sang through the first verse of the song. As far as she was concerned nothing could have been a greater relief. The sympathy she did not know how to give, the debt she had never discharged, the affection she had for Antony, and her own self-pity, Mrs. Carew threw into her voice, and it shook its tremulo through him. He breathed devotedly: "Thank you, _dear_," and raised one of his aunt's hands to his lips. Mr. Carew had let himself in with his latchkey, and was within a few feet of them as his wife finished her song. CHAPTER XXI Neither Antony nor Mrs. Carew had the presence of mind to stir. Mrs. Fairfax said of her brother-in-law that he was a "vain creature whose pomposity stood in place of dignity." Carew, at all events, came upon a scene which he had never supposed would confront his eyes. Before him in his own drawing-room, a whipper-snapper from the South was kissing his wife's hands. To Carew the South was the heart of sedition, bad morals, lackadaisical indolence. What the South could not do for him in arousing his distaste, the word "artist" completed. He said to his wife-- "Is _this_ the way you pass your Sabbath afternoons, Mrs. Carew?"