“I went to sleep very early and awakened half an hour ago. It is really morning.”

She was sitting up in a deep chair by the window.

“Let me look at you,” she said with a little laugh. “And then kiss me and go to bed.”

But even the lovely, faint early light revealed something to her.

“You walk like a young stag on the hillside,” she said. “You don’t want to go to sleep at all. What is it?”

He sat on a low ottoman near her and laughed a little also.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “ but I’m wide awake.”

The English summer dawn is of a magical clear light and she could see him well. She had a thrilled feeling that she had never quite known before what a beautiful thing he was—how perfect and shining fair in his boy manhood.

“Mother,” he said, “ you won’t remember perhaps—it’s a queer thing that I should myself—but I have never really forgotten. There was a child I played with in some garden when I was a little chap. She was a beautiful little thing who seemed to belong to nobody—”

“She belonged to a Mrs. Gareth-Lawless,” Helen interpolated.

“Then you do remember?”

“Yes, dear. You asked me to go to the Gardens with you to see her. And Mrs. Gareth-Lawless came in by chance and spoke to me.”

“And then we had suddenly to go back to Scotland. I remember you wakened me quite early in the morning—I thought it was the middle of the night.” He began to speak rather slowly as if he were thinking it over. “You didn’t know that, when you took me away, it was a tragedy. I had promised to play with her again and I felt as if I had deserted her hideously. It was not the kind of a thing a little chap usually feels—it was something different—something more. And to-night it actually all came back. I saw her again, mother.”

He was so absorbed that he did not take in her involuntary movement.

“You saw her again! Where?”

“The old Duchess of Darte was giving a small dance for her. Hallowe took me—”

“Does the Duchess know Mrs. Gareth-Lawless?” Helen had a sense of breathlessness.

“I don’t quite understand the situation. It seems the little thing insists on earning her own living and she is a sort of companion and secretary to the Duchess. Mother, she is just the same!”

The last words were a sort of exclamation. As he uttered them, there came back to her the day when—a little boy—he had seemed as though he were speaking as a young man might have spoken. Now he was a young man, speaking almost as if he were a little boy—involuntarily revealing his exaltation.

As she had felt half frightened years before, so she felt wholly frightened now. He was not a little boy any longer. She could not sweep him away in her arms to save him from danger. Also she knew more of the easy, fashionably accepted views of the morals of pretty Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, still lightly known with some cynicism as “Feather.” She knew what Donal did not. His relationship to the Head of the House of Coombe made it unlikely that gossip should choose him as the exact young man to whom could be related stories of his distinguished relative, Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and her girl.