It was her armour in an envious, merciless world, that would have rejoiced before her eyes if it could have driven in a barbed arrow even through her mother. More than once a jealous enemy had tried and failed, routed utterly by Lorraine’s cynical, cool treatment of a fact that she knew no persuasion nor arguing could have helped her to refute. She did not even weep about it now in secret. It was as though she had shed all the tears she had to shed during that year of utter revulsion spent in the Italian Riviera, companied by the passionless solitudes of snowtopped mountains. Something of a great patience and a great gentleness had come to her then, helping her to hide the loathing she could not crush, and place the fact of motherhood first of all. As her mother, she had taken Mrs. Vivian back into her heart, and given her generously of what worldly possessions she had. And she had done it with a wondrous quiet and absence of all ostentation either outwardly or inwardly. It had never occured to Lorraine that, whether it was a duty or not, after what had passed it was certainly a fine act upon her part. She had not questioned about it at all. To her mother’s apologetic gush she had merely turned calm eyes and a strong face. “It isn’t worth while to remember the past at all,” she had said; “we will just begin again on rather different lines. I’ll always let you have as much money as I can spare.” Mrs. Vivian had been a little taken aback by the new Lorraine who returned from Italy; and not a little afraid before the calm, inscrutable eyes; so that she had secretly rejoiced at the arrangement which gave her a separate establishment of her own; but none the less, in bursts of righteous indignation supposed to emanate from her outraged feelings as a mother, she usually chose to make it her pet grievance. And still Lorraine only smiled the tired smile, and glanced carelessly aside with the inscrutable eyes until the tirade was over, the coveted cheque made out, and her own little sanctum once again in peaceful possession. Only just occasionally, if the interview had been specially trying, she might have been seen afterwards to glance whimsically across to the picture, recently enlarged from an old photograph, of a fine-looking man in full hunting-rig standing beside a favourite hunter. “Poor old dad,” she murmured once; “I don’t wonder you couldn’t keep up the old place. I don’t know how you got along at all without my salary.”