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“Have you ever spoken to her as you speak to me?” I finally asked. “Have you ever put before her this terrible arraignment?”

“Put it before her? How can I put it before her when all she would have to say would be: ‘You, YOU, you base one, who made me–?'”

“Then why do you want to play her a trick?”

“I’m not bound to tell you, and you wouldn’t see my point if I did. I should play that boy a far worse one if I were to stay my hand.”

Oh I had my view of this. “If he loves her he won’t believe a word you say.”

“Very possibly, but I shall have done my duty.”

“And shall you say to him,” I asked, “simply what you’ve said to me?”

“Never mind what I shall say to him. It will be something that will perhaps helpfully affect him. Only,” she added with her proud decision, “I must lose no time.”

“If you’re so bent on gaining time,” I said, “why did you let her go out in the boat with him?”

“Let her? how could I prevent it?”

“But she asked your permission.”

“Ah that,” she cried, “is all a part of all the comedy!”

It fairly hushed me to silence, and for a moment more she said nothing. “Then she doesn’t know you hate her?” I resumed.

“I don’t know what she knows. She has depths and depths, and all of them bad. Besides, I don’t hate her in the least; I just pity her for what I’ve made of her. But I pity still more the man who may find himself married to her.”

“There’s not much danger of there being any such person,” I wailed, “at the rate you go on.”

“I beg your pardon–there’s a perfect possibility,” said my companion. “She’ll marry–she’ll marry ‘well.’ She’ll marry a title as well as a fortune.

“It’s a pity my nephew hasn’t a title,” I attempted the grimace of suggesting.

She seemed to wonder. “I see you think I want that, and that I’m acting a part. God forgive you! Your suspicion’s perfectly natural. How can any one TELL,” asked Louisa Pallant–“with people like us?”

Her utterance of these words brought tears to my eyes. I laid my hand on her arm, holding her a while, and we looked at each other through the dusk. “You couldn’t do more if he were my son.”

“Oh if he had been your son he’d have kept out of it! I like him for himself. He’s simple and sane and honest–he needs affection.”

“He would have quite the most remarkable of mothers-in-law!” I commented.

Mrs. Pallant gave a small dry laugh–she wasn’t joking. We lingered by the lake while I thought over what she had said to me and while she herself apparently thought. I confess that even close at her side and under the strong impression of her sincerity, her indifference to the conventional graces, my imagination, my constitutional scepticism began to range. Queer ideas came into my head. Was the comedy on HER side and not on the girl’s, and was she posturing as a magnanimous woman at poor Linda’s expense? Was she determined, in spite of the young lady’s preference, to keep her daughter for a grander personage than a young American whose dollars were not numerous enough–numerous as they were– to make up for his want of high relationships, and had she invented at once the boldest and the subtlest of games in order to keep the case in her hands? If she was prepared really to address herself to Archie she would have to go very far to overcome the mistrust he would be sure to feel at a proceeding superficially so sinister? Was she prepared to go far enough? The answer to these doubts was simply the way I had been touched–it came back to me the next moment–when she used the words “people like us.” Their effect was to wring my heart. She seemed to kneel in the dust, and I felt in a manner ashamed that I had let her sink to it. She said to me at last that I must wait no longer, I must go away before the young people came back. They were staying long, too long; all the more reason then she should deal with my nephew that night. I must drive back to Stresa, or if I liked I could go on foot: it wasn’t far–for an active man. She disposed of me freely, she was so full of her purpose; and after we had quitted the garden and returned to the terrace above she seemed almost to push me to leave her–I felt her fine consecrated hands fairly quiver on my shoulders. I was ready to do as she prescribed; she affected me painfully, she had given me a “turn,” and I wanted to get away from her. But before I went I asked her why Linda should regard my young man as such a parti; it didn’t square after all with her account of the girl’s fierce ambitions. By that account these favours to one so graceless were a woeful waste of time.