Three years! Lady Tranmore looked back upon them with feelings that wavered like smoke before a wind. A year of excitement, a year of illness, a year of extravagance, shaken moreover by many strange gusts of temper and caprice, it was so she might have summarized them. First, a most promising début in London. Kitty welcomed on all hands with enthusiasm as Ashe's wife and her own daughter-in-law, fêted to the top of her bent, smiled on at Court, flattered by the country-houses, always exquisitely dressed, smiling and eager, apparently full of ambition for Ashe no less than for herself, a happy, notorious, busy little person, with a touch of wildness that did but give edge to her charm and keep the world talking. Then, the birth of the boy, and Kitty's passionate, ungovernable recoil from the deformity that showed itself almost immediately after his birth--a form of infantile paralysis involving a slight but incurable lameness. Lady Tranmore could recall weeks of remorseful fondling, alternating with weeks of neglect; continued illness and depression on Kitty's part, settling after a while into a petulant melancholy for which the baby's defect seemed but an inadequate cause; Ashe's tender anxiety, his willingness to throw up Parliament, office, everything, that Kitty might travel and recover; and those huge efforts by which she and his best friends in the House had held him back--when Kitty, it seemed, cared little or nothing whether he sacrificed his future or not. Finally, she herself, with the assistance of a new friend of Kitty's, had become Kitty's nurse, had taken her abroad when Ashe could not be spared, had watched over her, and humored her, and at last brought her back--so the doctors said--restored. Was it really recovery? At any rate, Lady Tranmore was often inclined to think that since the return to London--now about a twelvemonth since--both she and William had had to do with a different Kitty. Young as she still was, the first exquisite softness of the expanding life was gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those who knew her best had yet perceived, seemed now and then to come to the surface, like wreckage in a summer sea. * * * * * The opening door disturbed these ponderings. The nurse appeared, carrying the little boy. Lady Tranmore took him on her knee and caressed him. He was a piteous, engaging child, generally very docile, but liable at times to storms of temper out of all proportion to the fragility of his small person. His grandmother was inclined to look upon his passions as something external and inflicted--the entering-in of the Blackwater devil to plague a tiny creature that, normally, was of a divine and clinging sweetness. She would have taught him religion, as his only shield against himself; but neither his father nor his mother was religious; and Harry was likely to grow up a pagan.