He, Henry, had, from other points of view, risen out of the affair with considerable good fortune. He had not, as far as he could perceive, earned Katherine’s undying hatred; he had not even made a fool of himself, as might naturally be expected. It was plain enough now that Philip was to be with them for ever and ever, and that therefore Henry must make the best of him. Now indeed that it had come to this, Henry was not at all sure that he might not like Philip very much indeed. That night at the ‘Empire’ had been the beginning of life for Henry, and the indifference of his mother to Philip’s past and the knowledge that Katherine had long been aware of it made him not a little ashamed of his indignation and tempers. Nevertheless Philip _had_ that effect upon him, and would have it many times again no doubt. For a clear and steady moment Henry, looking at himself in his looking-glass, wondered whether he were not truly the most terrible of asses. However, all this was of the past. It was with a sense of advancing to meet a new world that he went down to dinner. In the drawing-room he found his mother alone. She was wearing an evening dress of black silk, and Henry, whose suspicion of the world made him observant, noticed that she was wearing a brooch of old silver set with pearls. This was a family brooch, and Henry knew that his mother wore it only ‘on occasions’; his mother’s idea of what made an ‘occasion’ was not always that of the outside world. He wondered what the occasion might be to-night. He had, for long, been unconsciously in the habit of dividing his mother into two persons, the figure of domination and power who kept the household in awe and was mysterious in her dignity and aloof reserve, and the figure of maternal homeliness who spoke to one about underclothes, was subject to human agitations and pleasures; of the first he was afraid, and would be afraid until he died. The second he loved. His mother to-night was the first of these. She looked, in his eyes, amazingly young. Her fair grey hair, her broad shoulders, her straight back, these things showed Henry’s mother to be younger than ever Henry would be. The pearl brooch gleamed against the black silk that covered her strong bosom; her head was carried high; her eyes feared no man nor woman alive. Therefore Henry, as was his manner on such an occasion, did his best to slip quietly into a chair and hide his diminished personality in a book. This, however, was not permitted him. “Henry,” his mother said softly, “why did you not tell me earlier the things that you had heard about Philip?” Henry blushed so intensely that there was a thin white line just below the roots of his hair. “I didn’t want to make Katie unhappy,” he muttered. “I should have thought your duty to your parents came before your duty to Katherine,” his mother replied. “It wasn’t you who was going to marry Philip,” he answered, not looking at his mother.