‘What should you be called but Tom?’ said Lady Car, with a smile. ‘Torrance!’ cried the child with pride, as who should say Plantagenet. She had been looking at him, smiling, but at this utterance of the boy Lady Car started and turned burning red, then coldly pale. Why should she? Nothing could be more fantastic, more absurd, than the feeling. She had done no harm in making a second marriage, in which she had found happiness, after the first one, which had brought nothing but misery. She had offended against no law, written or unwritten. She had wiped out Torrance and his memory, and all belonging to him (except his money), for years. Why should the name which she had once borne, which was undeniably her son’s name, affect her so deeply now? The smile became fixed about the corner of her mouth, but the boy, of course, understood nothing of what was passing in his mother’s mind, though he stared at her a little as if he did, increasing her confusion. ‘The fellows never call a fellow by his christened name,’ said Tom, great in the superiority of what he had learned from various schoolboys on their travels. These were things, he was aware, which of course women didn’t know. ‘You’d better come and have a stroll with me, Master Tom,’ said Beaufort. ‘I’ll show you Piccadilly, which is always something; as for the park, you wouldn’t care for it: there are no riders in the Row now. You see, as I told you, there’s nobody in London. Come, get your hat, quickly.’ ‘Me too,’ said little Janet, with a pout of her small mouth. ‘Not any ladies to-day, only two fellows, as Tom says, taking a stroll together.’ ‘In a moment, Beau!’ cried Tom, delighted, rushing to get his hat. ‘I told you, Jan, old Beau’s a gentleman--sometimes,’ the boy added, as his sister ran after him to see what arrangements of her own she could make to the same end. ‘You are very good to them, Edward--oh! very good. How can I ever thank you?’ said Lady Car, with tears in her eyes. Her nerves had been a little shaken by that shock, and by the vain perception that stole over her of two parties in the family, two that would become more distinctly two by the progress of years, unlike in nature and constitution, and even in name. It is not necessary to insist upon the family name of children travelling with their mother. No one had been much the wiser during these years of wandering. But Tom’s ‘Torrance!’ was a revelation, and opened before her possibilities unknown. ‘Good, am I? That’s all right, that’s something to the credit side, but I was not aware of it,’ said Beaufort, in his easy way; ‘all the same,’ he added, laughing, ‘Master Tom will want looking after if we are to make anything of him. He will want a tight hand, which, I fear, does not belong either to you or me.’