"I don't think you need mind much. People are disposed to take a favourable view of you. You must manage to keep it up. The time of pigs and shorthorns is here," she said with a sigh. "Look: there is Silly Billy talking to Marie! She appears completely unconscious of his presence." "She probably is, for I don't think she ever poses." "There is faint praise in your voice," said Mildred. "Undesignedly. At least, I had no intention of doing the other thing. By the way, I disquieted myself in vain over the Silly Billy episode, I think. It has not caught on." "Nobody talked about anything else for three days," said Mildred, with a mother's protective instinct for her offspring. "You didn't suppose they would talk to you about it! But I am magnanimous enough to be glad it has dropped, Jack. It is very important--particularly important, I think--that you should have no joint in your harness just now. You will probably get into the Cabinet, upon which the searchlights will be turned on. I feel this strongly. I have meant to say it to you for--for some time." He looked at her for a moment without replying. "She caught it hot," he said to himself, not without satisfaction, for he saw vividly the truth of Lady Ardingly's estimate of her folly. "I feel it, too," he said; and, though they agreed, a discordant note was definitely struck, and vibrated very audibly to the inward ear, with its own-widening harmonics. "I am glad! As you implied to me not long ago, Cæsar's wife must be above suspicion. It was not very convincing to me then. But it is now. Also, Jack, it is best that Cæsar should not inspire spicy paragraphs in the gutter press." Jack felt unreasonably irritated. The cook spoke here. "Have you some scandal to tell me about myself," he asked, "also invented by you?" "No. But why show temper?" "Because you irritate me when you speak like that." Mildred felt suddenly a little uncomfortable; she had a sense of uncertain grip. "Really, Jack, you are very ungrateful!" she said. "I am taking all the trouble of sitting with you in the corner, and thinking of a hundred things for your good, which would never have occurred to you, and you merely tell me that I irritate you!" "Well, what is it?" he replied. She rose, really annoyed. "I will leave you to find out for yourself," she said. "You are sufficiently lucid. You have stated what you mean quite clearly. You will leave me. I have found out for myself. So shall we discuss it?" She had made a false move, and knew it. There was some indefinable change about Jack, which she recognised though she could not analyze it. But the prospect of losing him, even temporarily, on his initiative, was quite another matter to doing it on her own.