She was gathering up her brushes, rubbing her pallet with a rag, going through all the habitual last gestures with her usual somewhat pedantic precision. She found something wrong with one of the brushes, and bent over the lamp with it, her black brows jutting. At that moment she reminded her mother of old Mrs. Clephane; somehow, there was an odd solace in the likeness. “If he comes for anybody it’s for Lilla,” the mother thought, as her eyes rested on her daughter’s stern young profile; and again she felt the necessity of clearing up the mystery. On the whole, it might be easier to question Anne, now that the name had been pronounced between them. Major Fenno--and he had been wounded.... And all he cared about was his writing. X. After all, she was not going to be able to question Anne about Lilla. As she faced the situation the next day--as she faced the new Chris in her path--Kate Clephane saw the impossibility of using him as a key to her daughter’s confidence. There was one thing much closer to her now than any conceivable act of Chris’s could ever be; and that was her own relation to Anne. She simply could not talk to Anne about Chris--not yet. It was not that she regarded that episode in her life as a thing to be in itself ashamed of. She was not going, even now, to deny or disown it; she wanted only to deny and disown Chris. Quite conceivably, she might have said to her daughter: “Yes, I loved once--and the man I loved was not your father.” But to say it about Chris! To see the slow look of wonder in those inscrutable depths of Anne’s eyes: a look that said, not “I blame you”, or even “I disapprove you”, but, so much more scathingly, just: “You, mother--and _Chris_?” Yes; that was it. It was necessary for her pride and dignity, for her moral safety almost, that what people like Enid Drover would have called her “past” should remain unidentified, unembodied--or at least not embodied in Chris Fenno. Yet to know--to know! There were, of course, other sources of enlightenment; if there were anything in her theory of a love-affair between Lilla and Chris, the family were probably not unaware of it. Kate had the sense that they never had their eyes off Lilla for long. But it was all very well to plan to talk to them--the question remained, how to begin? Before trying to find out about Lilla she would first have to find out about them. What did she know of any one of them? Nothing more, she now understood, than their glazed and impenetrable surfaces. She was still a guest among them; she was a guest even in her daughter’s house. It was the character she had herself chosen; in her dread of seeming to assert rights she had forfeited, to thrust herself into a place she had deserted, she had perhaps erred in the other sense, held back too much, been too readily content with the easy part of the week-end visitor.