There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of this period of Benham’s life were too complicated and scattered for a cumulative effect.  In the background of his mind and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne.  They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay.  Lady Marayne’s moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons for regretting it.

“Ah!” she said, hanging only for a moment, and then:  “you told me you were alone!” . . .

Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London.  They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.

“When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry,” she remembered with a flash.  “You said, ‘Do I tell lies?’”

“I was alone.  Until—­ It was an accident.  On my walk I was alone.”

But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.

From the instant she heard of them she hated these South Harting people unrestrainedly.  She made no attempt to conceal it.  Her valiant bantam spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the rare and uncongenial ache of his secession.  “And who are they?  What are they?  What sort of people can they be to drag in a passing young man?  I suppose this girl of theirs goes out every evening—­ Was she painted, Poff?”

She whipped him with her questions as though she was slashing his face.  He became dead-white and grimly civil, answering every question as though it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry.

“Of course I don’t know who they are.  How should I know?  What need is there to know?”

“There are ways of finding out,” she insisted.  “If I am to go down and make myself pleasant to these people because of you.”

“But I implore you not to.”

“And five minutes ago you were imploring me to!  Of course I shall.”

“Oh well!—­well!”

“One has to know something of the people to whom one commits oneself, surely.”

“They are decent people; they are well-behaved people.”

“Oh!—­I’ll behave well.  Don’t think I’ll disgrace your casual acquaintances.  But who they are, what they are, I will know. . . .”

On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost expectations.

“Come round,” she said over the telephone, two mornings later.  “I’ve something to tell you.”

She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him.  When it came to telling him, she failed from her fierceness.