Lewisham grasped the essentials of the situation forthwith, and trembled on the brink of an expletive.  Ethel handed him a letter.

For a moment Lewisham held this in his hand asking; questions.  Mrs. Chaffery had come upon it in the case of her eight-day clock when the time to wind it came round.  Chaffery, it seemed, had not been home since Saturday night.  The letter was an open one addressed to Lewisham, a long rambling would-be clever letter, oddly inferior in style to Chaffery’s conversation.  It had been written some hours before Chaffery’s last visit his talk then had been perhaps a sort of codicil.

“The inordinate stupidity of that man Lagune is driving me out of the country,” Lewisham saw.  “It has been at last a definite stumbling block—­even a legal stumbling block.  I fear.  I am off.  I skedaddle.  I break ties.  I shall miss our long refreshing chats—­you had found me out and I could open my mind.  I am sorry to part from Ethel also, but thank Heaven she has you to look to!  And indeed they both have you to look to, though the ‘both’ may be a new light to you.”

Lewisham growled, went from page 1 to page 3—­conscious of their both looking to him now—­even intensely—­and discovered Chaffery in a practical vein.

“There is but little light, and portable property in that house in Clapham that has escaped my lamentable improvidence, but there are one or two things—­the iron-bound chest, the bureau with a broken hinge, and the large air pump—­distinctly pawnable if only you can contrive to get them to a pawnshop.  You have more Will power than I—­I never could get the confounded things downstairs.  That iron-bound box was originally mine, before I married your mother-in-law, so that I am not altogether regardless of your welfare and the necessity of giving some equivalent.  Don’t judge me too harshly.”

Lewisham turned over sharply without finishing that page.

“My life at Clapham,” continued the letter, “has irked me for some time, and to tell you the truth, the spectacle of your vigorous young happiness—­you are having a very good time, you know, fighting the world—­reminded me of the passing years.  To be frank in self-criticism, there is more than a touch of the New Woman about me, and I feel I have still to live my own life.  What a beautiful phrase that is—­to live one’s own life!—­redolent of honest scorn for moral plagiarism.  No Imitatio Christi in that ...  I long to see more of men and cities....  I begin late, I know, to live my own life, bald as I am and grey-whiskered; but better late than never.  Why should the educated girl have the monopoly of the game?  And after all, the whiskers will dye....