The name of ill omen staggered the mother a little.  Her voice was half harsh, half frightened: 

“Because of you!  You are ill, my poor child.  The shock has upset you.  You are out of your head.  The boy’s mind was unhinged by drink.  Every one said so.  He had broken his father’s heart with—­”

“But he did this because of me.  Because of what I let everybody think of him....  Mamma, I—­I must go back home.  I’m sorry to upset everything so....”

The maid stood by with her tray and glass, but no hand reached for the offering.

“Back to the hotel?  Of course!—­you are ill, my poor dear!  You need rest....”

“I mean back home.  You see I can’t be here now ... when this has happened.  I must go now, to-night.  I remember the train goes at nine-fifty-five.”

Mrs. Heth, wheeling upon the maid with livid perturbation, cried: 

“Get my wraps.”

     XX

     In which Jack Dalhousie wears a New Dignity, and the Lame
     Stranger comes to the House of Heth.

Dalhousie had been worthless while he lived.  Now he had achieved the last supreme importance.  The inconsiderable of yesterday wore a mute and mighty power.  So he reached over the spaces, and broke the brilliant dinner-party at the Cafe des Ambassadeurs.  So Mrs. Heth and Carlisle Heth disputed, by this new great dignity that was his, and talked in the hotel bedroom, and hurriedly changed evening attire for travelling suits.  And so Hugo Canning, abruptly widowed at a railway station, was left to toss wakefully that night, ridden by deepening anxieties....

For Cally had carried her extraordinary point; now that Jack Dalhousie was henceforward indifferent to all these matters.

She had said, with the deadly flatness of the mood which her mother so dreaded, that she wanted to go home to-night, and there had been no reasoning with her.  Go home for what?  Mrs. Heth had asked it twenty times, battling desperately against the menacing madness, now with argument and threat, now with tears and wheedlings.  And Cally, proceeding dry-eyed with her dressing and bag-packing, had proved unable to produce a single solid reason.

Still, it became clear that lock and key would not keep her.  The options ensuing were whether her mother should go with her, or Hugo should go, or Cally be allowed to go alone.  Small choice here, indeed.

Of that evening the events following the hurried departure from the Ambassadeurs were always blurred in Carlisle’s memory.  To Mrs. Heth each detail remained crystal-clear as long as she lived.  Upon her shoulders, as usual, fell the burden of managing everything so that the least harm should befall.  Defeated, and consequently hatted and cloaked, she emerged from the bedroom at quarter-past nine o’clock, commissioned by her daughter to tell Canning everything.  But what was everything, and what the mere gibberish of nervous insanity, to pass forever from the horizon with a good night’s sleep?  Mrs. Heth, seated before her living Order of Merit in the sitting-room, interpreted her commission with a mother’s wise discretion.