"It's my children I'm thinking of. . . . I don't want them picking up with any one, with the first person who comes along."
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, "If it's Jack you're worrying about, you needn't fuss any longer. He won't marry Thérèse. I don't think you know how ill he is. . . . I don't think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all."
"I always talk with the doctors."
"Then you ought to know that they're silly . . . the things you're saying."
"All the same, Sabine ought never to have come back here. . . ."
She saw now that the talk was turning back into the inevitable channel of futility where they would go round and round, like squirrels in a cage, arriving nowhere. It had happened this way so many times. Turning with an air of putting an end to the discussion, she walked over to the fireplace . . . pale once more, with faint, mauve circles under her dark eyes. There was a fragility about her, as if this strange spirit which had flamed up so suddenly were too violent for the body.
"Anson," she said in a low voice, "please let's be sensible. I shall look into this affair of Sybil and O'Hara and try to discover whether there is anything serious going on. If necessary, I shall speak directly to both of them. I don't approve, either, but not for the same reason. He is too old for her. You won't have any trouble. You will have to do nothing. . . . As to Sabine, I shall continue to see as much of her as I like."
In the midst of the speech she had grown suddenly, perilously, calm in the way which sometimes alarmed her husband and Aunt Cassie. Sighing a little, she continued, "I have been good and gentle, Anson, for years and years, and now, to-
