“Well, it’s all very simple,” she answered. “Of course it’s about Tony. Everyone’s interested in Tony. He’s just at the interesting age, and he’s quite exciting enough to make his people wonder what he’ll turn into. It’s the chrysalis into the—well, that just depends. And then, of course, I care a great deal more than the rest. Tony has been different to me from the rest. I suppose every mother’s like that, but I don’t think most of them have been such chums with their sons as I’ve been with Tony. We were alone in the country together for a long time and there was nobody else. And then the time came that I had prepared for and knew that I must face, the time when he had things that he didn’t tell me. Every boy’s like that, but I trusted him enough not to want to know, and he often told me just because I didn’t ask. Then he cared for all the right things and always ran straight; he never bent his brain to proving that black’s white and indeed rather whiter than most whites are, as so many people do. But just lately I’ve been a little anxious—we have all been—all of us who’re watching him. He ought to have settled down to something or some one by this time and one doesn’t quite know why he hasn’t; and he hasn’t been himself for the last six months. Things ought to have come to a head here. I don’t know what he’s been up to this week, but none of us have seen anything of him, and I can see that his thoughts are elsewhere all the time. It isn’t in the least that I doubt him or am unhappy, it is only that I would like some one to be there to give him a hand if he wants one. A woman wouldn’t do; it must be a man, and——” “You think I’m the person,” said Maradick. “Well, he likes you. He’s taken to you enormously. That’s always been a difficulty, because he takes to people so quickly and doesn’t seem to mind very much whom it is; but you are exactly the right man, the man I have wanted him to care for. You would help him, you could help him, and I think you will.” Maradick was silent. “You mustn’t, please, think that I mean you to spy in any way,” she continued. “I don’t want you to tell me anything. I shall never ask you, and you need never say anything to me about it. It is only that I shall know that there is some one there if he gets into a mess and I shall know that he’s all right.” She paused again, and then went on gently— “You mustn’t think it funny of me to speak to you like this when I know you so slightly. At my age one judges people quickly, and I don’t want to waste time. I’m asking a good deal of you, perhaps; I don’t know, but I think it would have happened in any case whether I had spoken or no. And then you will gain something, you know. No one can be with Tony—get to know him and be a friend of his—without gaining. He’s a very magical person.”