He pauses, but she makes no reply.

“Pardon me, Lady Dedlock.  This is an important subject.  You are honouring me with your attention?”

“I am.”

“Thank you.  I might have known it from what I have seen of your strength of character.  I ought not to have asked the question, but I have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on.  The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester.”

“Then why,” she asks in a low voice and without removing her gloomy look from those distant stars, “do you detain me in his house?”

“Because he is the consideration.  Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reliance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his wife.”

She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.

“I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester’s trust and confidence in you.  And even now, with this case, I hesitate.  Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that nothing can prepare him for the blow.”

“Not my flight?” she returned.  “Think of it again.”

“Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide.  It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day.  It is not to be thought of.”

There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no remonstrance.

“When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the family credit are one.  Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patrimony”—­Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here—­“are, I need not say to you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable.”

“Go on!”

“Therefore,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-trot style, “I have much to consider.  This is to be hushed up if it can be.  How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid upon a death-bed?  If I inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for?  What could have caused it?  What could have divided you?  Lady Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly, and you are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business) but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband.”

He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated.

“There is another point of view,” he continues, “in which the case presents itself.  Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation.  He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know.  I am putting an extreme case, but it might be so.  If so, it were better that he knew nothing.  Better for common sense, better for him, better for me.  I must take all this into account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult.”