"You all think we Americans are awfully young and raw, don't you?" he questioned.
"Oh, no, not that," she deprecated. "Young perhaps for these days, yes--but it is more that you--that your country is so--so unsuffered. And we don't want you to suffer!" she added quickly.
Yes, that was it! He understood now, and, heavens, how fine it was! Old England was wounded deep--deep. What she suffered herself she was too proud to show; but out of it she wrought a great maternal care for the newcomer. Yes, it _was_ fine--he hoped his country would understand.
Miss Gaylord rose. "There are Gerald and father looking for you," she said, "and I must go now." She held out her hand. "Thank you for letting me see her picture, and for everything you said about Captain Sherwood--for _everything_, remember--I want you to remember."
With a light pressure of her fingers she was gone, slipping away through the shrubbery, and he did not see her again.
So he came to his last morning at Bishopsthorpe; and as he dressed, he wished it could have been different; that he were not still conscious of that baffling wall of reserve between himself and Chev's people, for whom, despite all, he had come to have a real affection.
In the breakfast-room he found them all assembled, and his last meal there seemed to him as constrained and difficult as any that had preceded it. It was over finally, however, and in a few minutes he would be leaving.
"I can never thank you enough for the splendid time I've had here," he said as he rose. "I'll be seeing Chev to-morrow, and I'll tell him all about everything."
Then he stopped dead. With a smothered exclamation, old Sir Charles had stumbled to his feet, knocking over his chair, and hurried blindly out of the room; and Gerald said, "_Mother_!" in a choked appeal.
As if it were a signal between them, Lady Sherwood pushed her chair back a little from the table, her long delicate fingers dropped together loosely in her lap; she gave a faint sigh as if a restraining mantle slipped from her shoulders, and, looking up at the youth before her, her fine pale face lighted with a kind of glory, she said, "No, dear lad, no. You can never tell Chev, for he is gone."
"Yes," she nodded back at him, just above a whisper; and now her face quivered, and the tears began to rush down her cheeks.