She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He frowned at her, involuntarily. He was ready to accept Madame Beattie's knowing neither good nor evil, but she seemed to him singularly unpleasant in flaunting that lack of bias. She was quite conscious of his distaste, but it didn't trouble her. Unproductive opinions were nothing to her now, especially in Addington. "You're not going, too," said the colonel, as Esther rose and followed her. "I hoped--" But what he hoped he kept himself from saying. "I must," said Esther, with a little deprecatory look and another significant one at Madame Beattie's back. "Good-bye." She threw Lydia, in her scornful silence there in the background, a smile and nod. "But--" the colonel began. Again he had to stop. How could he ask her to come again when he was in the dark about her reason for coming at all? "I have to go," she said. "I really have to, this time." Meantime Jeff, handing Madame Beattie into the carriage, had had his word with her. "You'll do nothing until I see you." "If you see me moderately soon," said Madame Beattie pleasantly. "Esther, are you coming?" "No," said Esther, with a scrupulous politeness. "No, thank you. I shall walk." But before she went, and well in the rear of the carriage, so that even Denny should not see, she gave Jeff one look, a suffused, appealing look that bade him remember how unhappy she was, how unprotected and, most of all, how feminine. She and the carriage also had in the next instant gone, and Jeff went stolidly back up the steps. There was sweat on his forehead and he drew his breath like a man dead-tired. "My son," began the colonel. "Don't," said Jeff shortly. He knew what his father would like to do: ask, in the sincerest sympathy, why Esther had come, discuss it and decide with him whether she was to come again and stay, whether it would be ill or well for him. The red mounted to the colonel's forehead, and Jeff put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn't help remembering that his father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it. Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther to her elementary love of herself, Lydia--he looked at her as she stood still in the background like a handmaid waiting. Why, Lydia was a prisoner, as he had thought before, only not, as he had believed then, to the glamour of love, but love, actual love for him, the kind that stands the stress of all the homely services and disillusioning. A smile broke over his face, and Lydia, incredulously accepting it, gave a little sob that couldn't be prevented in time, and took one dancing step. She ran up to the colonel, and pulled him away from Jeff. It seemed as if she were about to make him dance, too.