would uphold the neutrality she with others had sworn to respect by force of arms.  And at that one immense sigh of relief went up from the whole country.  Whatever now might happen, in whatever horrors of long-drawn and bloody war the nation might be involved, the nightmare of possible neutrality, of England’s repudiating the debt of honour, was removed.  The one thing worse than war need no longer be dreaded, and for the moment the future, hideous and heart-rending though it would surely be, smiled like a land of promise.

Michael woke on the morning of Tuesday, the fourth of August, with the feeling of something having suddenly roused him, and in a few seconds he knew that this was so, for the telephone bell in the room next door sent out another summons.  He got straight out of bed and went to it, with a hundred vague shadows of expectation crossing his mind.  Then he learned that his mother was gravely ill, and that he was wanted at once.  And in less than half an hour he was on his way, driving swiftly through the serene warmth of the early morning to the private asylum where she had been removed after her sudden homicidal outburst in March.

CHAPTER XIV

Michael was sitting that same afternoon by his mother’s bedside.  He had learned the little there was to be told him on his arrival in the morning; how that half an hour before he had been summoned, she had had an attack of heart failure, and since then, after recovering from the acute and immediate danger, she had lain there all day with closed eyes in a state of but semi-conscious exhaustion.  Once or twice only, and that but for a moment she had shown signs of increasing vitality, and then sank back into this stupor again.  But in those rare short intervals she had opened her eyes, and had seemed to see and recognise him, and Michael thought that once she had smiled at him.  But at present she had spoken no word.  All the morning Lord Ashbridge had waited there too, but since there was no change he had gone away, saying that he would return again later, and asking to be telephoned for if his wife regained consciousness.  So, but for the nurse and the occasional visits of the doctor, Michael was alone with his mother.

In this long period of inactive waiting, when there was nothing to be done, Michael did not seem to himself to be feeling very vividly, and but for one desire, namely, that before the end his mother would come back to him, even if only for a moment, his mind felt drugged and stupefied.  Sometimes for a little it would sluggishly turn over thoughts about his father, wondering with a sort of blunt, remote contempt how it was possible for him not to be here too; but, except for the one great longing that his mother should cleave to him once more in conscious mind, he observed rather than felt.  The thought of Sylvia even was dim.  He knew that she was somewhere in the world, but she had become for the present like some picture painted