Mrs. Jordan began to fix her again, and now she saw that she must only take it all.  That was what it had come to:  his having sat with her there on the bench and under the trees in the summer darkness and put his hand on her, making her know what he would have said if permitted; his having returned to her afterwards, repeatedly, with supplicating eyes and a fever in his blood; and her having, on her side, hard and pedantic, helped by some miracle and with her impossible condition, only answered him, yet supplicating back, through the bars of the cage,—­all simply that she might hear of him, now for ever lost, only through Mrs. Jordan, who touched him through Mr. Drake, who reached him through Lady Bradeen.  “She adores him—­but of course that wasn’t all there was about it.”

The girl met her eyes a minute, then quite surrendered.  “What was there else about it?”

“Why, don’t you know?”—­Mrs. Jordan was almost compassionate.

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless.  “Of course I know she would never let him alone.”

“How could she—­fancy!—­when he had so compromised her?”

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, from the younger pair of lips. “Had he so—?”

“Why, don’t you know the scandal?”

Our heroine thought, recollected there was something, whatever it was, that she knew after all much more of than Mrs. Jordan.  She saw him again as she had seen him come that morning to recover the telegram—­she saw him as she had seen him leave the shop.  She perched herself a moment on this.  “Oh there was nothing public.”

“Not exactly public—­no.  But there was an awful scare and an awful row.  It was all on the very point of coming out.  Something was lost—­something was found.”

“Ah yes,” the girl replied, smiling as if with the revival of a blurred memory; “something was found.”

“It all got about—­and there was a point at which Lord Bradeen had to act.”

“Had to—­yes.  But he didn’t.”

Mrs. Jordan was obliged to admit it.  “No, he didn’t.  And then, luckily for them, he died.”

“I didn’t know about his death,” her companion said.

“It was nine weeks ago, and most sudden.  It has given them a prompt chance.”

“To get married?”—­this was a wonder—­“within nine weeks?”

“Oh not immediately, but—­in all the circumstances—­very quietly and, I assure you, very soon.  Every preparation’s made.  Above all she holds him.”

“Oh yes, she holds him!” our young friend threw off.  She had this before her again a minute; then she continued:  “You mean through his having made her talked about?”

“Yes, but not only that.  She has still another pull.”

“Another?”

Mrs. Jordan hesitated.  “Why, he was in something.”