"I thought he would have been with you. I thought he might have been here to bid me welcome home." He had made a picture in his mind, almost involuntarily, of the mother and child--she, calm and lovely as one of Murillo's Madonnas, with the little one on her knee. There was no vein of poetry in his nature, yet unconsciously the memory of such pictures had associated itself with his wife's image. And instead of that holy embodiment of maternal love, there flashed and sparkled before him this brilliant woman, with fair fluffy hair, and Louis Quinze coat, all a glitter with cut-steel. "Home!" echoed Christabel, mockingly; "how sentimental you have grown. I've no doubt the boy will be charmed to see you, especially if you have brought him some South American toys; but I thought it would bore you to see him before you had dined. He shall be on view in the drawing-room before dinner, if you would really like to see him so soon." "Don't trouble," said Leonard, curtly; "I can find my way to the nursery." He went upstairs without another word, leaving his friend Jack seated in the midst of the cheerful circle, drinking soda water and brandy, and talking of their adventures upon the backbone of South America. "Delicious country!" said de Cazalet, who talked remarkably good English, with just the faintest Hibernian accent. "I have ridden over every inch of it. Ah, Mrs. Tregonell, that is the soil for poetry and adventure; a land of extinct volcanoes. If Byron had known the shores of the Amazon, he would have struck a deeper note of passion than any that was ever inspired by the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus. Sad that so grand a spirit should have pined in the prison-house of a worn-out world." "I have always understood that Byron got some rather strong poetry out of Switzerland and Italy," murmured Mr. FitzJesse, meekly. "Weak and thin to what he might have written had he known the Pampas," said the Baron. "You have done the Pampas?" said Mr. FitzJesse. "I have lived amongst wild horses, and wilder humanity, for months at a stretch." "And you have published a volume of--verses?" "Another of my youthful follies. But I do not place myself upon a level with Byron." "I should if I were you," said Mr. FitzJesse. "It would be an original idea--and in an age marked by a total exhaustion of brain-power, an original idea is a pearl of price." "What kind of dogs did you see in your travels?" asked Emily St. Aubyn, a well-grown upstanding young woman, in a severe tailor-gown of undyed homespun. "Two or three very fine breeds of mongrels."