my mind at that moment) I entirely failed to comprehend. There
was neither time nor opportunity to ask her what she meant. With
a stiff little bow, addressed to Eustace, she left us as his
mother had left us taking the way to Broadstairs, and walking
rapidly.

At last we were alone.

I lost no time in beginning my inquiries; I wasted no words in
prefatory phrases. In the plainest terms I put the question to
him:

"What does your mother's conduct mean?"

Instead of answering, he burst into a fit of laughter--loud,
coarse, hard laughter, so utterly unlike any sound I had ever yet
heard issue from his lips, so strangely and shockingly foreign to
his character as _I_ understood it, that I stood still on the
sands and openly remonstrated with him.

"Eustace! you are not like yourself," I said. You almost frighten
me."

He took no notice. He seemed to be pursuing some pleasant train
of thought just started in his mind.

"So like my mother!" he exclaimed, with the air of a man who felt
irresistibly diverted by some humorous idea of his own. "Tell me
all about it, Valeria!"