‘No, no!’ Mr. Thomasson stammered.  ‘Of course not.’

‘No, damme!’ said my lord grandly.  ‘No peaching!’

‘No,’ Mr. Pomeroy said, glancing keenly from one to the other, ’and by token I have a thought that will cure it.  D’ye see here, my lord!  What do you say to the losers taking five thousand each out of Madam’s money?  That should bind all together if anything will—­though I say it that will have to pay it,’ he continued boastfully.

My lord was full of admiration.  ‘Uncommon handsome!’ he said.  ’Pom, that does you credit.  You have a head!  I always said you had a head!’

‘You are agreeable to that, my lord?’

‘Burn me, if I am not.’

‘Then shake hands upon it.  And what say you, Parson?’

Mr. Thomasson proffered an assent fully as enthusiastic as Lord Almeric’s, but for a different reason.  The tutor’s nerves, never strong, were none the better for the rough treatment he had undergone, his long drive, and his longer fast.  He had taken enough wine to obscure remoter terrors, but not the image of Mr. Dunborough—­impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer—­Dunborough doubly and trebly offended!  That image recurred when the glass was not at his lips; and behind it, sometimes the angry spectre of Sir George, sometimes the face of the girl, blazing with rage, slaying him with the lightning of her contempt.

He thought that it would not suit him ill, therefore, though it was a sacrifice, if Mr. Pomeroy took the fortune, the wife, and the risk—­and five thousand only fell to him.  True, the risk, apart from that of Mr. Dunborough’s vengeance, might be small; no one of the three had had act or part in the abduction of the girl.  True, too, in the atmosphere of this unfamiliar house—­into which he had been transported as suddenly as Bedreddin Hassan to the palace in the fairy tale—­with the fumes of wine and the glamour of beauty in his head, he was in a mood to minimise even that risk.  But under the jovial good-fellowship which Mr. Pomeroy affected, and strove to instil into the party, he discerned at odd moments a something sinister that turned his craven heart to water and loosened the joints of his knees.

The lights and cards and jests, the toasts and laughter were a mask that sometimes slipped and let him see the death’s head that grinned behind it.  They were three men, alone with the girl in a country house, of which the reputation, Mr. Thomasson had a shrewd idea, was no better than its master’s.  No one outside knew that she was there; as far as her friends were concerned, she had vanished from the earth.  She was a woman, and she was in their power.  What was to prevent them bending her to their purpose?

It is probable that had she been of their rank from the beginning, bred and trained, as well as born, a Soane, it would not have occurred even to a broken and desperate man to frame so audacious a plan.  But scruples grew weak, and virtue—­the virtue of Vauxhall and the masquerades—­languished where it was a question of a woman who a month before had been fair game for undergraduate gallantry, and who now carried fifty thousand pounds in her hand.