Lady Coryston broke out: "I repeat--you propose to me, Arthur, a bargain which is no bargain!--" "A quid without a quo?" interrupted Coryston, who had suddenly dropped his argument with Sir Wilfrid, and had thrown himself on a sofa near his mother and Arthur. Lady Coryston took no notice of him. She continued to address her youngest-born. "What Coryston may do--now--after all that has passed is to me a matter of merely secondary importance. When I first saw the notice of the Martover meeting it was a shock to me--I admit it. But since then he has done so many other things--he has struck at me in so many other ways--he has so publicly and scandalously outraged family feeling, and political decency--" "I really haven't," said Coryston, mildly. "I haven't--if this was a free country." Lady Coryston flashed a sudden superb look at him and resumed: "--that I really don't care what Coryston does. He has done his worst. I can't suffer any greater insult than he has already put upon me--" Coryston shook his head, mutely protesting. He seized a pen from a table near, and began to bite and strip it with an absent face. "But _you_, Arthur!" his mother went on with angry emphasis, "have still a character to lose or gain. As I have said, it doesn't now matter vitally to me whether Coryston is in the chair or not--I regard him as merely Glenwilliam's cat's-paw--but if _you_ let this meeting at Martover pass, you will have weakened your position in this constituency, you will have disheartened your supporters, you will have played the coward--and you will have left your mother disgracefully in the lurch--though that latter point I can see doesn't move you at all!" James and Sir Wilfrid Bury came anxiously to join the group. Sir Wilfrid approached the still standing and distressed Marcia. Drawing her hand within his arm, he patted it kindly. "We can't persuade your mother, my dear. Suppose you try." "Mother, you can't insist on Arthur's going through with the meeting if he doesn't wish to!" said Marcia, with animation. "Do let him give it up! It would be so easy to postpone it." Lady Coryston turned upon her. "Everything is easy in your eyes, no doubt, Marcia, except that he should do his duty, and spare my feelings! As a matter of fact you know perfectly well that Arthur has always allowed me to arrange these things for him." "I don't mean, mother, to do so in future!" said Arthur, resolutely turning upon her. "You _must_ leave me to manage my own life and my own affairs." Lady Coryston's features quivered in her long bony face. As she sat near the window, on a high chair, fully illumined, in a black velvet dress, long-waisted, and with a kind of stand-up ruffle at the throat, she was amazingly Queen Bess. James, who was always conscious of the likeness, could almost have expected her to rise and say in the famous words of the Queen to Cecil--"Little man, little man, your father durst not have said 'must' to me!"