Miss Thorne did not come to life, until in unhooking her dress Evans touched her with cold fingers. Then she started, exclaiming: "What is the matter with you, Evans," she cried. "Do go and put your hands in hot water before you touch me. Your fingers are like ice." The girl murmured that she had been upset since the loss of the bracelet--she felt responsible for Miss Thorne's jewels. Lydia flung down the roll of bills and cheques that represented her evening's winnings. "I could buy myself another with what I've won to-night. Don't worry about it." The idea occurred to her that she would buy herself a sort of memento mori, something to remind her not to be a weak craven female thing again--nestling against men's shoulders like May Swayne. Evans did not answer, but gathered up the money and the jewels and carried them into the dressing room to lock them in the safe. CHAPTER IV Lydia would have been displeased to know how little her curt refusal affected the emotional state of the man driving away from her door. It was the deed rather than the word that he remembered--the fact that he had held a beautiful and eventually unresisting woman in his arms that occupied his attention on his way home. He found his mother sitting up--not for him. It was many years since Mrs. O'Bannon had gone to bed before two o'clock. She was a large woman, massive rather than fat. She was sitting by the fire in her bedroom, wrapped in a warm, loose white dressing gown, as white as her hair and smooth pale skin. Her eyes retained their deep darkness. Evidently Dan's gray eyes had come from his father's Irish ancestry. It was only the other day--after he was grown up--that O'Bannon had ceased to be afraid of his mother. She was a woman passionately religious, mentally vigorous and singularly unjust, or at least inconsistent. It was this quality that made her so confusing and, to her subordinates, alarming. She would have gone to the stake--gone with a certain bitter amusement at the folly of her destroyers--for her belief in the right; but her affections could entirely sweep away these beliefs and leave her furiously supporting those she loved against all moral principles. Her son had first noticed that trait when she sent him away to boarding school. His mother--his father had died when he was seven--was a most relentless disciplinarian as long as a question of duty lay between him and her; but let an outsider interfere, and she was always on his side. She frequently defended him against the school authorities, and even, it seemed to him, encouraged him in rebellion. In her old age most of her strong passions had died away and left only her God and her son. Perhaps it was a trace of this persecutory religion in her that made Dan accept his present office. She looked up like a sibyl from the great volume she was reading. "You're late, my son." "I've been gambling, mother."