For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and defending David’s daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette’s embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham’s gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall. "I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a penn’orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But—if somebody like you had been my mother—perhaps there’d have been something to show for it to-day." Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain—the figure that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes. "You’re worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by what he said, you’re not going to trust to Chance and Luck. You’re going—for Uncle Owen’s sake, and Aunt Lynette’s, and Bawne’s—and Mother’s and Irma’s and your own—don’t pretend you’re a victim!—to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!" Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her neighbour—the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation and cornerstone of Christianity—had not as yet awakened in Patrine. She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not the _cachet_ of one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four hundred _per annum_—as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to his daughter’s children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of the unknown possessive male.