The question remained, what was to be done?  Robert would have to be told, of course.  Mrs. Pendleton’s first impulse was to retract her promise to take charge of Sisily, and wash her hands of the whole affair.  Then she thought of the money, and wavered.  Robert had made her a generous offer, and the money would have helped so much!  She had already planned the spending of the cheque he had given her that afternoon.  She had thought of a new suite of drawing-room furniture, and bedroom carpets.  She had a vision of a small motor-car, later on.

As she pondered over the situation she thought she saw a way out—­a way so simple and practical that she was astonished that it had not occurred to her before.

Mrs. Pendleton was a woman of decision and prompt of action when she made up her mind.  Her mind was made up now.  She glanced across the table at her husband.  “Joseph!” she said.

Mr. Pendleton, hidden behind the sheets of a newspaper just arrived from London, had the temerity not to hear.  He was in a grumpy mood, arising, in the first instance, from having been dragged away from his business and his club to Cornwall.  It was nothing to him that he was in the Land of Lyonesse.  His brief impression of the Duchy was that it was all rocks, and that Penzance was a dull town without a proper seafront, swarming with rascally shopkeepers who tried to sell serpentine match-boxes at the price of gold ones, and provided with hotels where dull tourists submitted to a daily diet of Cornish pasties and pollock under the delusion that they were taking in local colour in the process.  Mr. Pendleton’s stomach resented his own rash deglutition of these dainties, and in consequence he was suffering too much with acute indigestion to think of the compensation he would gain at next year’s Academy by standing with a bragging knowing air before pictures of the Cornish coast, expatiating to his bored acquaintances (who had never been to Cornwall) on their lack of merit compared with the real thing.  Like most husbands, Mr. Pendleton had been able to reach the conclusion that the real cause of his bodily and mental discomfort was his wife, so he maintained a sulky silence behind the pages of his newspaper.

With that lack of ceremony which the familiarity of marriage engenders in the female breast, his wife leant across the table and plucked the paper from his hand.

“Listen to me, Joseph,” she said, “I want to talk to you.”

Lacking the newspaper screen, Mr. Pendleton’s rebellious tendencies instantly evaporated beneath his wife’s searching eye.

“Yes, my dear,” he replied meekly.  “What about?”

“About Sisily.  Did you notice that she did not speak a word during dinner?”

“Perhaps she was overcome with grief, my dear.”

“Nonsense!  Grief does not make a woman speechless.  She’s one of the dumb sort of girls.  I always mistrust a girl who hasn’t plenty to say for herself.”