"Laura's child?" Oliver Tropenell visioned the bright, high-spirited, merry little girl, who somehow, he could not have told her why, seemed often to be a barrier between himself and Laura. "Alice--my friend Alice--was full of buoyancy, of sympathy for every living thing. She possessed what I so much lacked in those days, and still alas! lack--sound common-sense. And yet she, too, had her ideals, ideals which did not lead her into a very happy path, for Robert Baynton, high-minded though he may have been, was absorbed in himself--there was no room for any one else." Had she been telling her story to any one but her son, Mrs. Tropenell would have added, "Laura is very like him." Instead, she continued, "No one but Alice would have made Robert Baynton happy, or have made as good a thing of the marriage as she did--for happy they were. I think it was the sight of their happiness that made me at last long for something different, for something more normal in my life than that strange, unreal tie with St. Amant. So at last, when I was four-and-twenty, I married your father." Oliver remained silent, and she said a little tremulously, "He was very, very good to me. He made me a happy woman. He gave me _you_." There was a long, long pause. Mrs. Tropenell had now come to what was the really difficult part of the task she had set herself. "You are thinking, my boy, of _afterwards_." And as she felt him move restlessly, she went on pleadingly, "As to that, I ask you to remember that I was very lonely after your father died. Still, if you wish to know the real truth"--she would be very honest now--"that friendship which you so much disliked stood more in the way of your having a stepfather than anything else could have done." "I see that now," he said sombrely, "but I did not see it then, mother." "Even if Lady St. Amant had not lived on, as she did, all those years, I should not have married St. Amant--I think I can say that in all sincerity. So you see, Oliver, you need not have been afraid, when at last he became free." She sighed a long, unconscious sigh of relief. "I gather you still see him very often when he's at Knowlton Abbey?" "Yes, it's become a very comfortable friendship, Oliver. But for St. Amant I should often feel very lonely, my dear." She longed to go on--to tell Oliver how hard it had been for her to build up her life afresh--after he had finally decided to stay on in Mexico. But she doubted if he would understand.... Suddenly he turned and kissed her. "Good-night," he said. "I'm grateful to you for having told me all--all that you have told me, mother." * * * * * Oliver Tropenell hurried up the silent house. By his own wish the large garret to which he had removed all his own treasures and boyish belongings after a delicate childhood spent in a room close to his mother's, was still in his room, and it had been very little altered.