She thought she could trust “Billy”; she felt that a hard-headed man of business would not go over to Paris on so grave an errand and leave it undone; but she could not be sure, a thousand things might happen. Channel steamers never do get wrecked, but the one in which he crossed might do so; the train might come to grief; Paris might be in revolution; Paris made revolutions as rapidly as it made omeletts for breakfast; she was not naturally imaginative, but in this tension of terror her fancy conjured up innumerable horrors as she apparently kneeled in prayer. When she came home she shut herself up in her bedroom, said she had a headache and took a little chloral. As she lay on her sofa, with a handkerchief over her eyes, she heard the children trundling down the staircase to go for their afternoon drive; they always were driven somewhere into the country on Sunday afternoons to avoid the crowds and noise of the parks. She heard Jack’s voice shouting a negro melody as he jumped down three stairs at a time. She got up despite her headache and her chloral, opened her door which led on to the stairs, and caught the little sinner as he passed her by his blouse. “How can you let the duke disgrace himself so?” she said sternly to the governess. “The very boys in the street respect the seventh day.” Then, still with her fair hand closed fast on the blouse she said to the wearer of it: “I am shocked at you, Jack! Go upstairs to your room and stay there. You do not go out to-day.” The great tears brimmed up in Jack’s eyes, but he would not cry; he looked at her with a fixed reproachful, indignant look, very like Brancepeth. The governess and the nurses all pleaded for him; everyone in the household loved Jack as they hated Boo. But it was in vain; his mother was in that kind of mood when every woman must have a victim, and he was all that offered to her. He was taken upstairs to be locked in his chamber by a sympathetic under-nurse, who whispered consolation. Boo, half vexed, half pleased, called after him with much self-righteousness: “I telled you never to sing those naughty songs. Didn’t I tell you, Jack?” Jack did not reply or look round; he went manfully onward and upward to his doom. His mother retired to her own repose, whilst Boo, with the two other little boys, descended down to the entrance-hall. She was glad to think of Jack shut up in solitude and fretting his heart out this fine clear rainless afternoon in May. The governess and the head nurse whispered together in the landau as to the duchess’s strange unkindness to her eldest son. Boo, who never lost a word of their whispering, when she sat between them, turned up her pretty nose: “Mammy don’t like Jack ’cos he’s got everything; she’s got to give him her jewels.”