'I'll give him a drink,' he said.

'Yes, yes, anything. Lord Mountry, you really must go. I know I'm
rude. I don't know what I'm saying. But--my boy is returning to
me.'

The accumulated chivalry of generations of chivalrous ancestors
acted like a spur on his lordship. He understood but dimly, yet
enough to enable him to realize that a scene was about to take
place in which he was most emphatically not 'on'. A mother's
meeting with her long-lost child, this is a sacred thing. This was
quite clear to him, so, turning like a flash, he bounded through
the doorway, and, as somebody happened to be coming in at the same
time, there was a collision, which left him breathing apologies in
his familiar attitude of stooping to pick up his hat.

The new-comers were a tall, strikingly handsome girl, with a
rather hard and cynical cast of countenance. She was leading by
the hand a small, fat boy of about fourteen years of age, whose
likeness to the portrait on the chair proclaimed his identity. He
had escaped the collision, but seemed offended by it; for, eyeing
the bending peer with cold distaste, he summed up his opinion of
him in the one word 'Chump!'

Lord Mountry rose.

'I beg your pardon,' he said for perhaps the seventh time. He was
thoroughly unstrung. Always excessively shy, he was embarrassed
now by quite a variety of causes. The world was full of eyes--Mrs