The sound of the motor, whirring skilfully among the lanes, was heard at six, and shortly after Madame von Marwitz's return Mrs. Talcott knocked at her door. Madame von Marwitz was lying on the sofa. Louise had removed her wraps and dress and was drawing off her shoes. Her eyes were closed. She seemed weary. "I'll see to Madame," said Mrs. Talcott with her air of composed and unassuming authority. It was somewhat the air of an old nurse, sure of her prerogatives in the nursery. Louise went and Mrs. Talcott took off the other shoe and fetched the white silk _mules_. Madame von Marwitz had only opened her eye for a glimmer of recognition, but as Mrs. Talcott adjusted a _mule_, she tipped it off and muttered gloomily: "Stockings, please. I want fresh stockings." There was oddity--as Mrs. Talcott found, and came back, with a pair of white silk stockings--in the sight of the opulent, middle-aged figure on the sofa, childishly stretching out first one large bare leg and then the other to be clothed; and it might have aroused in Mrs. Talcott a vista of memories ending with the picture of a child in the same attitude, a child as idle and as autocratic. "Thank you, Tallie," Madame von Marwitz said, wearily but kindly, when the stockings were changed. Mrs. Talcott drew a chair in front of the sofa, seated herself and clasped her hands at her waist. "I've come for a talk, Mercedes," she said. Madame von Marwitz now was sleepily observing her. "A talk! _Bon Dieu!_ But I have been talking all day long!" She yawned, putting a folded arm under her head so that, slightly raising it, she could look at Mrs. Talcott more comfortably. "What do you want to talk about?" she inquired. Mrs. Talcott's eyes, with their melancholy, immovable gaze, rested upon her. "About Karen and her husband," she said. "I gathered from some talk I had with Karen to-day that you let her think you came away from London simply and solely because you'd had a quarrel with Mr. Jardine." Madame von Marwitz lay as if arrested by these words for some moments of an almost lethargic interchange, and then in an impatient voice she returned: "What business is it of Karen's, pray, if I didn't leave London simply and solely on account of my quarrel with her husband? I had found it intolerable to be under his roof and I took the first opportunity for leaving it. The opportunity happened to coincide with my arrangements for coming here. What has that to do with Karen?" "It has to do with her, Mercedes, because the child believes you were thinking about her when, as a matter of fact, you weren't thinking about her or about anyone but this young man you've gotten so taken up with. Karen believes you care for her something in the same way she does for you, and it's a sin and a shame, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott spoke with no vehemence at all of tone or look, but with decision, "a sin and a shame to let that child ruin her life because of you."