The insolence and the courage of her character brought her back to the scene of her slavery to William Massarene. She felt that it was necessary to show her brother that she did not care a straw for his condemnation, and to prove to society in general that her position was unshaken. Who could tell how that young woman, who had sent her the counterfoils and the acceptances, might not have talked? Besides, she wished to see her children. Her affection for them was genuine. It was not profound or unselfish, it was not tender or ideal, but it was a real affection in its way; and, besides, she was proud of them. They were the handsomest little people in England; always well and always strong. Against Jack she bore a grudge--unreasoningly and unkindly--but still, she wished to have him with her in London. The presence of the little duke and his brothers and sister in her new house would prove to people that her conduct had always been perfectly correct. “One does miss one’s children so cruelly,” she said to her sister Carrie, who answered: “Yes, one does; it is like losing one’s dressing-bag.” She fully expected Hurstmanceaux to forbid their coming to her, but he left the matter to the Ormes’s decision; he was at Faldon, and gave no opinion one way or the other. To her intimate friends she attributed her rupture with him to his extreme severity and unkindness about the Otterbourne diamonds and her own financial affairs; and, as she was always a popular person, and he never was, her version was accepted and circulated, and the opinion of the world was indulgent to her. She took a pretty, furnished house in Eaton Place, and resumed the life which she had led when Cocky, like a ministering angel, had been behind her, to excuse her imprudence and share her extravagance. The Blenheims were left down at Whiteleaf, but Jack and his brothers and sister were brought to town. Boo, wild with delight, raced upstairs to a bedroom on the third floor, and thought that altitude a seventh heaven. Jack was dull; he loved the country and hated London, hated it doubly now that he had lost Harry, and he felt sure that his mother was the cause of Harry’s disappearance. When he saw the Life Guards ride down through the Park to Knightsbridge, the sight made him very sad, for there were no kind dark eyes looking at him with a smile in them from under the shining helmet. His mother, who was not harassed by such regrets, was very pleased to be in London again with a little money at her back. She was very tenacious of her social position, and she knew that it was necessary to be respectable now and then. She attended the first Drawing-room; went to the first receptions of some tiresome _gros bonnets_ whom she called old dowdies; and reascended a social throne which for a moment had shaken under her. The Chapel Royal saw her every Sunday, and she began to think of making a pleasant second marriage before Katherine Massarene (who might spoil one) should return to society.