Marcella and Maxwell looked at each other. Ancoats! No doubt the catastrophe so long staved off had at last arrived. Maxwell's stifled exclamation was the groan of the overworked man who hardly knows how to find mind enough for another anxiety. But a new and sudden light shone in his wife's face. She turned to the servant almost with eagerness: "Please tell Mrs. Allison and Lord Fontenoy to come up." CHAPTER XIX The door opened silently, and there came in a figure that for a moment was hardly recognised by either Maxwell or his wife. Shrunken, pale, and grief-stricken, Ancoats's poor mother entered, her eye seeking eagerly for Maxwell, perceiving nothing else. She was in black, her veil hurriedly thrown back, and the features beneath it were all blurred by distress and fatigue. Marcella hurried to her. Mrs. Allison took her hand in both her own with the soft, appealing motion habitual to her, then said hastily, still looking at Maxwell: "Maxwell, the boy has gone. He left me two days ago. This morning, in my trouble, I sent for Lord Fontenoy, my kind, kind friend. And he persuaded me to come to you at once. I begged him to come too--" She glanced timidly from one to the other, implying many things. But even with this preface, Maxwell's greeting of his defeated antagonist was ceremony itself. The natural instinct of such a man is to mask victory in courtesy. But a paragraph that morning in Fontenoy's paper--a paragraph that he happened to have seen in Lord Ardagh's room--had appealed to another natural instinct, stronger and more primitive. It amazed him that even this emergency and Mrs. Allison's persuasions could have brought the owner of the paper within his doors on this particular morning. Fontenoy, immersed in the correspondence of the morning, had not yet chanced to see the paragraph, which was Harding Watton's. Yet, if he had, he could not have shown a more haughty and embarrassed bearing. He was there under a compulsion he did not know how to resist, a compulsion of tears and grief; but the instinct for manners, which so often upon occasion serves the man of illustrious family, as well, almost, as good feeling or education may serve another, had been for the time weakened in him by the violences and exhaustion of the political struggle, and he did not feel certain that he could trust himself. He was smarting still through every nerve, and the greeting especially that Maxwell's tall wife extended to him was gall and bitterness. She meanwhile, as she advanced towards him, was mostly struck with the perfection of his morning dress. The ultra-correctness and strict fashion that he affected in these matters were generally a surprise to those who knew him only by reputation.