This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their discomfiture, since--just here he got up and looked at his watch as he did so--it lacked scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture, that he wasn’t there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t waiting for a parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which one could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle about the nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of gewgaws; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features and complexion. And yet--Peter caught himself away from staring, as he passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that--it was a perfectly honest mask; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two and twenty. His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near, bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag--obviously a servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid--old and “colored” and manifestly respectable--must move down the hall and sit outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across to the stranger. “Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you, to ask you something very odd?” She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil.