My first question at the station had, of course, been as to Mrs. Loring. I was assured that her ladyship’s mother was somewhat better, but still awaiting the dangerous crisis of the fever. Margot, not a whit less girlish for her maternity, met me in the doorway, and had the nurse there with the boy--the Earl of Gorse. They said he looked like me--and he did, though I do not believe they thought so. Why should they say it? I was still a young man and might marry again. I fancy the same prudent instinct prompted them to give him Godfrey as one of his four or five names. Why do I think they did not believe he looked like me? Because all of them were ashamed of everything American. In the frequent quarrels between Margot and Hugh, he never failed to use the shaft that would surely pierce the heart of her vanity and rankle there--her low American birth, in such ghastly and grotesque contrast to the illustrious descent of her husband. She had an acid tongue when it came to quarreling; she could hurl taunts about his shifts to keep up appearances before he met her that made ugly and painful marks on his hide. She had discovered, probably by gossiping with some traitor servant, that he had been flouted by a rich English girl for a chauffeur--and you may be sure she put it to good use. But nothing she could say made him quiver as she quivered when he opened out on the subject of those “filthy bounders in the States.” Do not imagine, gentle reader, that my daughter was unhappily married. She would not have exchanged places with anyone but the wife of a duke; and Hugh--well, he needed the money. Nor should you think that they lived unhappily together. They saw little of each other alone; and in public they were as smiling and amiable with each other as--perhaps as you and your husband. A fine baby was the Earl of Gorse--one who in a decent environment would have grown up a sensible, useful person. But hardly, I feared, when he was already living in his own separate apartment, with his name--“The Earl of Gorse”--on a card beside the door, and with all the servants, including his mother, treating him as if he were of superior clay. This when he barely had his sight. They say a baby learns the utility of bawling at about three days old; I should say the germ of snobbishness would get to work very soon thereafter.