“I have no objection whatever,” said Juliet.  She was looking from one to the other with a slightly puzzled expression.

“What is it?” said Fielding, pausing.

His look was kindly.  Juliet laughed.  “I don’t know.  I feel as I felt that day you caught me trespassing.  Am I trespassing, I wonder?”

“No!” said Fielding and Green in one breath.

She swept them a deep Court courtesy.

“Thank you, gentlemen!  With your leave I will now withdraw.”

The squire was at the door.  He bowed her out with ceremony, watched her cross the hall, then sharply turned his head.  Green was watching her also, but, keen as the twist of a rapier in the hand of a practised fencer, his eyes flashed to meet the squire’s.

Fielding smiled grimly.  He motioned him forward, gripped him by the arm, and drew him out of the ream.  They mounted the shallow oak stairs side by side.

At the top in a tense whisper Fielding spoke.  “Don’t you be a fool, Richard!  Don’t you be a damn’ fool!”

Dick’s laugh had in it a note that was not of mirth.  “All right, sir, I’ll do my best,” he said.

It was a drawn battle, and they both knew it.  By tacit consent neither referred to the matter again.

CHAPTER IV

A POINT OF HONOUR

“How like my husband!” said Mrs. Fielding impatiently, fidgeting up and down the long drawing-room with a fretful frown on her pretty face.  “Why didn’t you put a stop to it, Miss Moore?  You might so easily have said that the storm had upset me and I wasn’t equal to a visitor at the dinner-table to-night.”  She paused to look at herself in the gilded mirror above the mantel-piece.  “I declare I look positively haggard.  I’ve a good mind to go to bed.  Only if I do—­” she turned slowly and looked at Juliet—­“if I do, he is sure to be brutal about it—­unless you tell him you persuaded me.”

Juliet, seated in a low chair, with a book on her lap, looked up with a gleam of humour in her eyes.  “But I am afraid I haven’t persuaded you,” she said.

Mrs. Fielding shrugged her white shoulders impatiently.  “Oh, of course not!  You only persuade me to do a thing when you know that it is the one thing that I would rather die than do.”

“Am I as bad as that?” said Juliet.

“Pretty nearly.  You’re coming to it.  I know you are on his side all the time.  He knows it too.  He wouldn’t tolerate you for a moment if you weren’t.”

“What a horrid accusation!” said Juliet, with a smile.

“The truth generally is horrid,” said Mrs. Fielding.  “How would you like to feel that everyone is against you?”

“I don’t know.  I expect I should find a way out somehow.  I shouldn’t quarrel,” said Juliet.  “Not with such odds as that!”

“How—­discreet!” said Mrs. Fielding, with a sneer.

“Discretion is my watchword,” smiled Juliet.