He looked moved and surprised--perhaps more than she had expected him to be. But his answer came instantly: "I am glad, mother. I'm very, very glad! I want to tell you, I've meant to tell you for some time, that I felt I've been very churlish in this matter of Lord St. Amant. He's always been good to me! Very, very good. I owed him a great deal as a boy. Lately, well, mother, you must have noticed it yourself, we've become really friends." He looked swiftly round the pretty room. Till this morning he had always been here alone with Laura, having eyes only for her. He saw now what a charming room it was--so warm, so cosy too, on this chilly, wintry December day. He exclaimed: "It will be good to think of you here--wherever I may be----" She felt a tremor go through her. Somehow she had thought that he meant to settle down in England; he had never said anything about it, but she had thought that that was his intention. "Is Laura willing to spend a part of every year in Mexico, my dearest?" He nodded, rather absently, as if the question hardly required an answer. She moved closer to him. "You are very happy, are you not, Oliver?" she asked in a low voice, and looking up into his face. And again he answered at once, almost as though he had seen the question in her eyes before she uttered it: "Very, very happy, mother! I don't suppose any man has ever been happier than I have been." Again she put an intimate, probing question, wondering at her own courage, her own temerity, in doing so. "Laura wholly satisfies you?" she asked, allowing nothing of the doubt which was still in her heart to creep into her voice. "Wholly," he said, again in that strong, confident voice. "And, mother--?" he waited a moment, and then, in a voice suddenly tense with emotion, he muttered--"what she is to me, I, all unworthy though I be, am to her. Do you know what--what response means to a man?" "I think I do," she said in a low voice. They remained silent. She felt as if she were, for the first time, fused in intense spiritual communion with her son. He broke the spell. "There's something I want you to know," he said. And then he stopped short, and, looking away, exclaimed, "Laura shall tell you!" The carriage gong echoed through the great house. He opened the door, she passed through it, and so together they walked down to the large, rather bare hall. There they waited a few moments in silence, till there came the sound of light footsteps--Laura running downstairs, a small fur cap on her beautiful head. She hurried towards them, smiling, and Mrs. Tropenell turned away--a twinge of jealous pain, of which she was ashamed, in her heart--and stared into the big log fire. She heard Oliver exclaim, in accents at once imploring and imperious: "Laura? Come over here a moment."