James had disappeared into his room, so she took herself off to bed. Surely he might have said a word! It had all gone off so well. Mr. Urquhart had been such a success, and she really liked him very much. And how the Judge had taken to him! And how Lancelot! At the first stair she stopped, in three quarters of a mind to go in and screw a sentence out of him. But no! She feared the angry blank of the eyeglass. Trailing up to bed, she thought that she could date the crumbling of her married estate by the ascendency of the eyeglass. And to think, only to think, that when she was engaged to James she used to play with it, to try it in her eye, to hide it from him! Well, she had Lancelot--her darling boy. That brought to mind that, a week to-night, she would be orphaned of him. The day she dreaded was coming again--and the blank weeks and months which followed it. True to his ideas of "discipline," of the value of doing a thing well for its own sake, Macartney was dry about the merits of the dinner-party when they met at breakfast. "Eh? Oh, yes, I thought it went quite reasonably. Urquhart talked too much, I thought." "My dear James,"--she was nettled--"you really are--" He looked up; the eyeglass hovered in his hand. "_Plait-il_?" "Nothing. I only thought that you were hard to please." "Really? Because I think a man too vivacious?" Lancelot said to his porridge-bowl, over the spoon, "I think he's ripping." "You've hit it," said his father. "He'd rip up anybody." Lucy, piqued upon her tender part, was provoked into what she always avoided if she could--acrimony at breakfast. "I was hostess, you see; and I must say that the more people talk the more I am obliged to them. I suppose that you asked Mr. Urquhart so that he might be amusing...." James's head lifted again. You could see it over the _Morning Post_. "I asked Urquhart for quite other reasons, you remember." "I don't know what they were," said Lucy. "My own reason was that he should make things go. 'A party in a parlour...'" She bit her lip. The _Morning Post_ quivered but recovered itself. "What was the party in a parlour, Mamma? Do tell me." That was Lancelot, with a _flair_ for mischief. "It was 'all silent and all damned,'" said Lucy. "Jolly party," said Lancelot. "Not like yours, though." The _Morning Post_ clacked like a bellying sail, then bore forward over an even keel. Lucy, beckoning Lancelot, left the breakfast-room.