I came to myself, as it were, on hearing him whisper, with his face close to mine: "You witch! You witch! How did you ever manage it?" I made the necessity for giving him an explanation the excuse for working myself free. "I didn't manage it. It was Mrs. Brokenshire." He cried out, incredulously: "Oh no! Not the madam!" "Yes, Hugh. It was she. She asked him. She must have begged him. That's all I can tell you about it." He was even more incredulous. "Then it must have been on your account rather than on mine; you can bet your sweet life on that!" "Hugh, darling, she's fond of you. She's fond of you all. If you could only have--" "We couldn't." For the first time he showed signs of admitting me into the family sense of disgrace. "Did you ever hear how dad came to marry her?" I said that something had reached me, but one couldn't put the blame for that on her. "And she's had more pull with him than we've had," he declared, resentfully. "You can see that by the way he's given in to her on this--" I soothed him on this point, however, and we talked of a general reconciliation. From that we went on to the subject of our married life, of which his father, in the hasty interview of half an hour before, had briefly sketched the conditions. A place was to be found for Hugh in the house of Meek & Brokenshire; his allowance was to be raised to twelve or fifteen thousand a year; we were to have a modest house, or apartment in New York. No date had been fixed for the wedding, so far as Hugh could learn; but it might be in October. We should be granted perhaps a three months' trip abroad, with a return to New York before Christmas. He gave me these details with an excitement bespeaking intense satisfaction. It was easy to see that, after his ten months' rebellion, he was eager to put his head under the Brokenshire yoke again. His instinct in this was similar to Ethel's and Jack's--only that they had never declared themselves free. I could best compare him to a horse who for one glorious half-hour kicks up his heels and runs away, and yet returns to the stable and the harness as the safest sphere of blessedness. Under the Brokenshire yoke he could live, move, have his being, and enjoy his twelve or fifteen thousand a year, without that onerous responsibility which comes with the exercise of choice. Under the Brokenshire yoke I, too, should be provided for. I should be raised from my lowly estate, be given a position in the world, and, though for a while the fact of the _mésalliance_ might tell against me, it would be overcome in my case as in that of Libby Jaynes. His talk was a pæan on our luck.