The sight of the blundering local practitioner that morning had revealed to her the danger of excluding Lord Henry any longer from her family affairs. Her difficulties had become too heavy. She knew that he and he alone could assist her; and she determined to enlist his help. Thus her principal "secret" man, the most cherished of all her clandestine male attachments, was to be brought by her own hand, by her own act and exertion, into the presence of charms far more magnetic, far more irresistible than any she could now hope to wield, and which were all the more apparent to her for being so much like her own. This was indeed a surrender of principle which showed that Mrs. Delarayne's maternal instinct had been moved to action; but its energy in this case, creditable as it was, fell so far short of what it might have been in the case of a beloved son, that the widow far from being happy, was conscious only of being urged by painful duty upon the errand she was now fulfilling. The presence of Leonetta in the car, though an insoluble mystery to the child herself, was accounted for simply as an obvious manoeuvre on the part of an angry and ingenious woman of the world, to retaliate to some extent upon the chief cause of all her trouble, the annoyance and disturbance he had occasioned her. But she was too sensible to upbraid the girl herself. She knew how fatally decisive opposition might prove at this stage in Leonetta's sudden excitement over Denis Malster, and she resolved to be guided in the whole of the complicated business by the sure hand of Lord Henry. To Leonetta's secretly guilty heart, however, her mother's silence seemed to remove the one possible explanation that yet remained for her having been made to drive to Ashbury; and by the time three quarters of the journey had been accomplished, she resigned herself to a mood of mystified boredom. Occasionally her mother would mutter anxiously: "I wonder whether Lord Henry will be in";--but that was all. Her affability and good nature seemed to be the same as usual. At last the car drew up at the northern outskirts of Ashbury, before a building that appeared to Leonetta as unlike her mental image of a sanatorium as anything could possibly be. It was a large building with a white stucco front, badly cracked all over,--evidently a sort of old manor house of about the period of George IV,--and the sight of the smart motor cars drawn up on either side of the road in front of its partly dilapidated gate, seemed but to enhance the general impression of decay which characterised both the house and its surroundings. The string of cars, however, brought a smile to Mrs. Delarayne's lips, for they showed that Lord Henry's clinique was open that day. "Now wait for me here, in the car," she said in her most positive manner, "however long I am."