“Ah there you are!” she sighed, though I didn’t quite know what she meant by it. “Of course it’s difficult for a woman to judge how far to go,” she went on. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I’m intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back—don’t you see what I mean?—I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued as if she had long been baffled of this modest desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she pursued with a dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I’m afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn’t mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly and without transition she brought out: “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino’s being better. I’ve seen him and he’s not at all right.” I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed. “Surely his mother would know, wouldn’t she?” She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great beeches. “As regards most matters one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sister-in-law will, or would, do. But in the present case there are strange elements at work.” “Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?” “No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.” “Elements of affection of course; elements of anxiety,” I concurred. “But why do you call them strange?” She repeated my words. “Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She’s very anxious.” Miss Ambient put me indescribably ill at ease; she almost scared me, and I wished she would go and write her letters. “His father will have seen him now,” I said, “and if he’s not satisfied he will send for the doctor.” “The doctor ought to have been here this morning,” she promptly returned. “He lives only two miles away.”