When Ida saw this, she was sorry she had made the remark, for she had no wish to appear to Mr. Cossey (the conquest of whom gave her neither pride nor pleasure) in the light of a spiteful, or worst still, of a jealous woman.  She had indeed heard some talk about him and Mrs. Quest, but not being of a scandal-loving disposition it had not interested her, and she had almost forgotten it.  Now however she learned that there was something in it.

“So that is the difficult position of which he talks,” she said to herself; “he wants to marry me as soon as he can get Mrs. Quest off his hands.  And I have consented to that, always provided that Mrs. Quest can be disposed of, in consideration of the receipt of a sum of thirty thousand pounds.  And I do not like the man.  It was not nice of him to make that bargain, though I brought it on myself.  I wonder if my father will ever know what I have done for him, and if he will appreciate it when he does.  Well, it is not a bad price—­thirty thousand pounds—­a good figure for any woman in the present state of the market.”  And with a hard and bitter laugh, and a prescience of sorrow to come lying at the heart, she threw down the remains of the Scarlet Turk and turned away.

CHAPTER XII

GEORGE PROPHESIES

Ida, for obvious reasons, said nothing to her father of her interview with Edward Cossey, and thus it came to pass that on the morning following the lawn tennis party, there was a very serious consultation between the faithful George and his master.  It appeared to Ida, who was lying awake in her room, to commence somewhere about daybreak, and it certainly continued with short intervals for refreshment till eleven o’clock in the forenoon.  First the Squire explained the whole question to George at great length, and with a most extraordinary multiplicity of detail, for he began at his first loan from the house of Cossey and Son, which he had contracted a great many years before.  All this while George sat with a very long face, and tried to look as though he were following the thread of the argument, which was not possible, for his master had long ago lost it himself, and was mixing up the loan of 1863 with the loan of 1874, and the money raised in the severance of the entail with both, in a way which would have driven anybody except George, who was used to this sort of thing, perfectly mad.  However he sat it through, and when at last the account was finished, remarked that things “sartainly did look queer.”

Thereupon the Squire called him a stupid owl, and having by means of some test questions discovered that he knew very little of the details which had just been explained to him at such portentous length, in spite of the protest of the wretched George, who urged that they “didn’t seem to be gitting no forrader somehow,” he began and went through every word of it again.

This brought them to breakfast time, and after breakfast, George’s accounts were thoroughly gone into, with the result that confusion was soon worse confounded, for either George could not keep accounts or the Squire could not follow them.  Ida, sitting in the drawing-room, could occasionally hear her father’s ejaculatory outbursts after this kind: