For owing to some—­in his eyes—­quixotic tenderness of conscience on Eugenie’s part, she would not sue for her divorce.  She believed that Albert was not responsible—­that he might return to her.  And that passionate spiritual life of hers, the ideas of which Lord Findon only half understood, forbade her, it seemed, any step which would finally bar the way of that return; unless Albert should himself ask her to take it.  But the Comte had never made a sign.  Lord Findon could only suppose that he found himself as free as he wished to be, that the ladies he consorted with were equally devoid of scruples, and that he, therefore, very naturally, preferred to avoid publicity.

So here was Eugenie, husbandless and childless at eight-and-twenty—­for the only child of the marriage had died within a year of its birth; the heroine of an odious story which, if it had never reached the law courts, was none the less perfectly well known in society; and, in the eyes of those who loved her, one of the bravest, saddest, noblest of women.  Of course Welby had shared in the immense effort of the family to comfort and console her.  They had been so eager to accept his help; he had given it with such tact and self-effacement; and now, meanly, they must help Eugenie to dismiss him!  For it was becoming too big a thing, this devotion of his, both in Eugenie’s life and also in the eyes of the world.  Lord Findon must needs suppose—­he did not choose to know—­that people were talking; and if Eugenie would not free herself from her wretched Albert, she must not provide him—­poor child!—­with any plausible excuse.

All of which reasoning was strictly according to the canons as Lord Findon understood them; but it did not leave him much the happier.  He was a sensitive, affectionate man, with great natural cleverness, and much natural virtue—­wholly unleavened by either thought or discipline.  He did the ordinary things from the ordinary motives; but he suffered when the ordinary things turned out ill, more than another man would have done.  It would certainly have been better, he ruefully admitted, if he had not meddled so much with Eugenie’s youth.  And presently he supposed he should have to forgive Charlie!—­(Charlie was the son who had married his nurse)—­if only to prove to himself that he was not really the unfeeling or snobbish father of the story-books.

Ah! there was the upstairs door!  Should he show himself, and make Arthur understand that he was their dear friend all the same, and always would be?—­it was only a question of a little drawing-in.

But his courage failed him.  He heard the well-known step come downstairs and cross the hall.  The front door closed, and Lord Findon was still balancing the paper-knife.

Would he really marry that nice child Elsie?  Elsie Bligh was a cousin of the Findons; a fair-haired, slender slip of a thing, the daughter of a retired Indian general.  The Findons had given a ball the year before for her coming-out, and she had danced through the season, haloed, Euphrosyne-like, by a charm of youth and laughter—­till she met Arthur Welby.  Since then Euphrosyne had grown a little white and piteous, and there had been whisperings and shakings of the head amongst the grown-ups who were fond of her.