being already forty-five minutes overdue, might arrive at any moment made it imperative that he remain where he was instead of sitting, as he would much have preferred to sit, in one of the waiting-rooms. It would be a disaster if his mother should get out of the train and not find him there to meet her. That was just the sort of thing which would infuriate her; and her mood, after a Channel crossing and a dreary journey by rail, would be sufficiently dangerous as it was. 

 The fog and the waiting had had their effect upon Derek. The resolute front he had exhibited to Freddie at the breakfast-table had melted since his arrival at the station, and he was feeling nervous at the prospect of the meeting that lay before him. Calm as he had appeared to the eye of Freddie and bravely as he had spoken, Derek, in the recesses of his heart, was afraid of his mother. There are men—and Derek Underhill was one of them—who never wholly emerge from the nursery. They may put away childish things and rise in the world to affluence and success, but the hand that rocked their cradle still rules their lives. As a boy, Derek had always been firmly controlled by his mother, and the sway of her aggressive personality had endured through manhood. Lady Underhill was a born ruler, dominating most of the people with whom life brought her in contact. Distant cousins quaked at her name, while among the male portion of her nearer relatives she was generally alluded to as The Family Curse. 

 Now that his meeting with her might occur at any moment, Derek shrank from it. It was not likely to be a pleasant one. The mere fact that Lady Underhill was coming to London at all made that improbable. When a man writes to inform his mother, who is wintering on the Riviera, that he has become engaged to be married, the natural course for her to pursue, if she approves of the step, is to wire her congratulations and good wishes. When for these she substitutes a curt announcement that she is returning immediately, a certain lack of complaisance seems to be indicated. 

 Would his mother approve of Jill? That was the question which he had been asking himself over and over again as he paced the platform in the disheartening fog. Nothing had been said, nothing had even been hinted, but he was perfectly aware that his marriage was a matter regarding which Lady Underhill had always assumed that she was to be consulted, even if she did not, as he suspected, claim the right to dictate. And he had become engaged quite suddenly, without a word to her until it was all over and settled. 

 That, as Freddie had pointed 

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