Her position of confidante, however, caused her many qualms of conscience. Her common sense told her that he was treading the path to an all too commonplace bonfire. The woman was some years older than he. Marcelle admitted her beauty and superficial charm; but her feminine instinct pounced on insincerities, affectations and hardnesses undreamed of by the guileless worshipper. She divined, to her great dismay, a sudden sex upheaval in this young and self-thwarted woman rather than a pure passion of love. What ought she to do? The question kept her awake of nights. She could not, without breaking the most solemn specific promise, ask counsel of Baltazar. Nor could she refuse to listen further to the boy. He would go his own way and leave her in the misery of incertitude. To go pleading to Lady Edna, like the heavy mother in a French play, was unimaginable. What then remained for her but to continue to receive his confidences? And even then, if she met them with copybook maxims, he would turn on her with his original _tu quoque_, and, if she persisted, it would be equivalent to the withdrawal of her sympathetic attention. The only course, therefore, that remained open was to let things go on as they were, and, as far as it lay in her power, to keep his feet from pitfalls. His strange mixture, precipitated by the war, of child and man, appealed to all the woman within her. In his dealings with men—she saw him with pride at his father’s table—he had the air and the experience of five-and-thirty. In dealing with women, even with her own motherly self, he was the romantic, unsophisticated boy of eighteen. His real age now was twenty-one. And at the back of her clean mind lay the conviction that Lady Edna, however indiscreet she might be, could not make the complete and criminal fool of herself. This conviction deepened when she had an opportunity of seeing them again together, at a little dinner party of six to which Baltazar had invited Lady Edna and the Jackmans. Between them it was “Godfrey” and “Edna” frank and undisguised. Their friendship was obvious; obvious, too, her charming assumption of proprietorship. But she carried it off with the air of a beautiful woman accustomed to such domination over the men she admitted to her intimacy. Beyond this, Marcelle could espy nothing; not a soft word, not a covert glance that betrayed a deeper sentiment. It is all play to her, she concluded, and grew happier in her mind. Toward the end of the evening after the Jackmans had gone, Lady Edna said lightly to Baltazar: “This boy has told me all sorts of wonderful things about his den here, and I’ve never seen it.” Baltazar waved one hand and put the other on Godfrey’s shoulder. “He shall do the honours.” “Would you really like to see it?” Godfrey asked innocently. “Of course I should. Your souvenirs——” Baltazar beamed on them till they left the drawing-room. “It’s the best day’s work I ever did for Godfrey,” said he. “What?”