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Updated: June 3, 2025
"I fear we may be making an altogether improper claim upon you," he said quietly; "but this morning, about an hour ago, Ancoats's mother came to us with the news that he had left her two days ago, and was now discovered to be at Trouville, where he has a chalet, waiting for this girl, of whom we all know, to join him. You will imagine Mrs. Allison's despair.
At any rate, for some time Lady Maxwell talked with sympathy, with effusion even, to her companion. In the first place she told her the story of their hostess. Thirty years before, Mrs. Allison, the daughter and heiress of a Leicestershire squire, had married Henry Allison, old Lord Ancoats's second son, a young captain in the Guards.
Allison a scandal of the kind suggested meant a tragedy. Her passion for her son was almost a tragedy already, so closely mingled in it were the feelings of the mother and those of the Christian, to whom "vice" is not an amusement, but an agony. Yet, as Marcella said and felt, it was a hard fate that had forced Maxwell to concern himself with Ancoats's love-affairs at this particular moment.
It was so evident the girl's whole nature thrilled to the approaching step. She turned her head towards Ancoats, as though against her will, her tall form drawn erect, in unconscious tension. Ancoats's quick eyes ran over the group. "He thinks we have been talking about him," was Betty's quick reflection, which was probably not far from the truth.
He had only been induced to preside over it with difficulty; and his mother had been both hurt and puzzled by his reluctance to play the host. If you had asked Maxwell's opinion on the point, he would have told you that Ancoats's bringing up had a good deal to do with the present anxieties of Ancoats's mother. He Maxwell had done his best, but he had been overmatched.
Yet nothing could be taken hold of till this sudden emergence of a particular group of stories, coupling Ancoats's name with that of a notorious little actress whose adventures had already provided a certain class of newspaper with abundant copy. Then Maxwell, who cared personally very little for the red-haired youth himself, took alarm for the mother's sake. For in the case of Mrs.
This then taken together with the stories now besprinkling the newspapers was the situation. Naturally, Ancoats's affairs, as he himself was irritably aware, were now, in one way or another, occupying the secret thoughts or the private conversations of most of his mother's guests. For instance "Are you nice?" said Betty Leven, suddenly, to young Lord Naseby, in the middle of Sunday morning.
In truth, Tressady was not particularly flattered by Ancoats's fancy for him. He did not care enough about the lad in return. Yet, in response to one or two outbreaks of talk on Ancoats's part talks full of a stagey railing at convention he had tried, for the mother's sake, to lecture the boy a little to get in a word or two that might strike home.
He fell, struck by a spear, in a single-file march through some nameless swamp; and a few days afterwards the words of a Foreign Office telegram broke a pining woman's heart. Old Lord Ancoats's death, which followed within a month or two, was hastened by the shock of his son's loss; and before the year was out the eldest son, who was sickly and unmarried, also died, and Mrs.
The paragraph, without names, without even initials, contained an outline of Lord Ancoats's affairs which Harding, who knew everything of a scandalous nature, declared to be well informed. It had made George whistle; and afterwards he had watched Mrs. Allison go to church with a new interest in her proceedings.
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