The advice was not unnecessary. After Miss Vanbrugh had departed Molly began to doubt whether she had done well in being so friendly. She tried the experiment of disparaging the visitor to her husband, watching him keenly to see the effect of her remarks. But Alistair was on his guard, and only responded by shrugging his shoulders and saying: “If you don’t like her you needn’t see any more of her. You have only not to return the call, and the Vanbrughs will leave us alone. If you do return it, I suppose they will ask us to dinner. Please yourself. As long as you don’t interfere with my friendships I won’t interfere with yours.” The prospect of going to a real dinner-party--a dinner-party at which ladies would be present--was a strong temptation to Molly. She decided that the acquaintance must be kept up. “Of course I shall return her call,” she said sharply. “What do you take me for? Do you think I’m jealous of an ordinary girl like that, who doesn’t even know where to get her gloves?” During the next few days there was a perceptible change in Molly’s behaviour towards her husband. She suggested his going to look up some of his friends, and asked him to choose at what place they should dine. It was in the midst of this effort of the little creature’s to be a good wife to Alistair that Alistair’s mother came to see her. Caroline had found her simple morality confused by the transformation of Molly Finucane into Lady Alistair Stuart. Ordinarily the marriage ceremony would have amounted in her view to a complete white-washing of the sinner. It was the atonement prescribed by all her social and religious canons. But this particular marriage concerned her as a mother. She could not but view with jealousy an atonement made at her son’s expense, and she found an excuse for condemnation in the fact that the marriage had taken place in a registry office. The Duchess was not so strong a Churchwoman as to deem it no marriage at all, but she could, and did, regard it as something short of that reconciliation with righteousness and respectability which a union blessed by the Church would have been. She could not forgive her son’s wife, but she could not quite condemn her. In this frame of mind she made her way to Beers Cooperage one morning before lunch, determined to give her first visit a neutral character. The appearance of the Duchess after an absence of so many weeks caused a flutter of excitement in the little court, and all its inhabitants hastened out of doors to greet her. As it happened, Lady Alistair was in her house alone, and hearing the sounds, she went to the window and looked out. The spectacle of an elderly lady in old-fashioned black silk walking up the yard amid the throng of her dependents told Molly nothing. It was an entire surprise to see the visitor advance straight to her own door, and to hear her say to the people thronging round her: “I am going in here first. I will see you all again when I come out.”