“Of course I am!” she answered. “Didn’t you know it?” She seemed astonished, but I was still more so, for Corvick had told me the exact contrary. I didn’t mention this, however; I only reminded her how little I had been on that score in her confidence, or even in Corvick’s, and that, moreover I wasn’t in ignorance of her mother’s interdict. At bottom I was troubled by the disparity of the two accounts; but after a little I felt Corvick’s to be the one I least doubted. This simply reduced me to asking myself if the girl had on the spot improvised an engagement—vamped up an old one or dashed off a new—in order to arrive at the satisfaction she desired. She must have had resources of which I was destitute, but she made her case slightly more intelligible by returning presently: “What the state of things has been is that we felt of course bound to do nothing in mamma’s lifetime.” “But now you think you’ll just dispense with mamma’s consent?” “Ah it mayn’t come to that!” I wondered what it might come to, and she went on: “Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you know,” she added with a laugh, “she really _must_!”—a proposition of which, on behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged the force. CHAPTER VIII. NOTHING more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware before Corvick’s arrival in England that I shouldn’t be there to put him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the alarming illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had gone to Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the art of portraiture in oils. The near relative who made him an allowance had threatened to withdraw it if he should, under specious pretexts, turn for superior truth to Paris—Paris being somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt, the school of evil, the abyss. I deplored this prejudice at the time, and the deep injury of it was now visible—first in the fact that it hadn’t saved the poor boy, who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the lungs, and second in the greater break with London to which the event condemned me. I’m afraid that what was uppermost in my mind during several anxious weeks was the sense that if we had only been in Paris I might have run over to see Corvick. This was actually out of the question from every point of view: my brother, whose recovery gave us both plenty to do, was ill for three months, during which I never left him and at the end of which we had to face the absolute prohibition of a return to England. The consideration of climate imposed itself, and he was in no state to meet it alone. I took him to Meran and there spent the summer with him, trying to show him by example how to get back to work and nursing a rage of another sort that I tried _not_ to show him.