Lady Ashbridge looked up from the breakfast she was giving Petsy II.  His dietary was rather less rich than that of the defunct, and she was afraid sometimes that his food was not nourishing enough.

“I remember the concert we had here,” she said.  “We had the ’Song to Aegir’ twice.”

Lord Ashbridge gave her a quick glance.  Michael felt he would not have noticed it the evening before.

“Your memory is very good, my dear,” he said with encouragement.

“And then we had a torchlight procession,” she remarked.

“Quite so.  You remember it perfectly.  And about his visit here, Michael.  Did he talk about that?”

“Yes, very warmly; also about our international relations.”

Lord Ashbridge gave a little giggle.

“I must tell Barbara that,” he said.  “She has become a sort of Cassandra, since she became a diplomatist, and sits on her tripod and prophesies woe.”

“She asked me about it,” said Michael.  “I don’t think she believes in his sincerity.”

He giggled again.

“That’s because I didn’t ask her down for his visit,” he said.

He rose.

“And what are you going to do, my dear?” he said to his wife.

She looked across to Michael.

“Perhaps Michael will come for a stroll with me,” she said.

“No doubt he will.  I shall have a round of golf, I think, on this fine morning.  I should like to have a word with you, Michael, when you’ve finished your breakfast.”

The moment he had gone her whole manner changed:  it was suffused with the glow that had lit her last night.

“And we shall have another talk, dear?” she said.  “It was tiresome being interrupted last night.  But your father was better pleased with you this morning.”

Michael’s understanding of the situation grew clearer.  Whatever was the change in his mother, whatever, perhaps, it portended, it was certainly accompanied by two symptoms, the one the late dawning of mother-love for himself, the other a certain fear of her husband; for all her married life she had been completely dominated by him, and had lived but in a twilight of her own; now into that twilight was beginning to steal a dread of him.  His pleasure or his vexation had begun to affect her emotionally, instead of being as before, merely recorded in her mind, as she might have recorded an object quite exterior to herself, and seen out of the window.  Now it was in the room with her.  Even as Michael left her to speak with him, the consciousness of him rose again in her, making her face anxious.

“And you’ll try not to vex him, won’t you?” she said.

His father was in the smoking-room, standing enormously in front of the fire, and for the first time the sense of his colossal fatuity struck Michael.

“There are several things I want to tell you about,” he said.  “Your career, first of all.  I take it that you have no intention of deferring to my wishes on the subject.”