“First, my dear, to tell you that it is all right. I may stay. I had lunch with the children in the nursery, and just as we had finished a maid came to say that Mrs. Chater would see me in the study. Down I crawled, wishing that I was the heroine of a novel who would have passed firmly down the stairs and into the room, 'pale, but calm and serene.' Oh! I was pale enough, I feel sure. But as to serene!--my heart was flapping about just like a tin ventilator in a wind, and I was jumpy all over. You see what a coward am I. “Mrs. Chater had grown since last I saw her. Of that I am convinced. She sat, enormous, thunder-browed, bolt upright in a straight chair. I stood and quivered. Books are all wrong, dear. In books the consciousness of virtue gives one complete self-possession in the face of any accusation, however terrible. In books it is the accuser of the innocent who is ill at ease. Oh, don't believe it! Mrs. Chater had the self-possession, I had the jim-jams. “'I have not seen you since last night,' she said. “I gave a kind of terrified little squeak. I had no words. “'Your version of what happened I do not wish to hear,' she went on. “This relieved me, because for the life of me I could not have told her had she wished to hear it. So I gave another little mouse-squeak. “'My son has told me.' Her voice was like a deep bell. 'How you can reconcile your conduct with the treatment that you have received at my hands, here beneath my roof'--she was very dramatic at this point--'I do not know.' “Nor did I--but not in the way she meant. I was thinking how ignoble was my meek attitude in light of what had happened. But you don't know what it was like, facing that woman and dreading the worse fate of being turned out into this awful London again. Another wretched little squeak slipped out of me, and she went on. “'My boy,' said she, 'has implored me to overlook this matter. My boy has declared there were faults on both sides' (!!!!). 'If I acted rightly as a mother, what would I do?' “I didn't tell her, Georgie. Could I tell her that if she acted rightly as a mother she would box her boy's fat ears until his nose bled? I couldn't. I squeaked instead. “'If I acted rightly as a mother,' said she, 'I would send you away. I am not going to.' “I squeaked. “'I choose to believe that your behaviour in this matter was a slip. I believe the episode will be a lesson to you. That is all. Go.' I goed.” II. George, when he had read thus far, was broadly grinning. Obviously Mrs. Chater was not such a bad sort after all. If--as no doubt--she implicitly believed her son's version of the incident, then her attitude towards Mary was, on the whole, not so bad. But his Mary, when she had written thus far, laid down her pen, put her pretty head upon the paper and wept.