That Eric should be taking, or ever have taken, a more than fatherly interest in Marjorie was news to me. I am not very perceptive in these matters; but the possibility of such a thing explained a good deal to me—Eric’s persistent dislike of Roy, for instance. Still, I had no desire to pursue the topic; and switched accordingly. "I am afraid she will have to be told now," I said. "It’s in the paper this morning. People will be writing to condole, and so on." "I know," said Lord Eskerley. "I shall tell her myself—this afternoon." He shook his white head sorrowfully. "It will be pretty awful, though: a woman ought to do it really." He glanced up at the portrait of his long dead wife. "We will give her one more morning, poor little soul! Hark!" The door into the hall stood open; so, apparently, did the door of Marjorie’s room, on the first floor above us. As we stood, we could hear her voice uplifted in a somewhat exaggerated apostrophe to her own son; also that self-satisfied infant’s gurgling reception of the same. Mother and son, by the way, had been in the house for more than three weeks, having been conveyed thither from a nursing home in Kensington, where, thanks to the timely warning of a flamboyant but attractive young person named Liss Lyle, we had been constrained to look for them. Miss Lyle was now our constant visitor, and had completely enmeshed the hitherto impregnable Meadows. "Extraordinary gibberish, baby talk!" remarked Lord Eskerley. "Primeval, of course, and quite unaltered through the ages." Then, suddenly: "Poor child, she’s had a hard time! Three years of exhausting self-imposed drudgery—then maternity! And now she has to be told that she’s a widow. My God, Alan, how I hate Wilhelm sometimes! And he once dined in this house!" "What is the news, by the way?" I asked.