Thresk replaced the miniature in the drawer in front of him and leaned back in his chair.  He looked now straight at Mr. Hazlewood.

“It was not, I take it, in order to put those questions to me that you were kind enough, Mr. Hazlewood, to ask me to give my opinion on your miniatures.  For that would have been setting a trap for me, wouldn’t it?”

Hazlewood stared at Thresk with the bland innocence of a child.  “Oh no, no,” he declared, and then an insinuating smile beamed upon his long thin face.  “Only since you are here and since so much is at stake for me—­my son’s happiness—­I hoped that you might perhaps give us an answer or two which would disperse the doubts of some suspicious people.”

“Who are they?” asked Thresk.

“Neighbours of ours,” replied Hazlewood, and thereupon Robert Pettifer stepped forward.  He had remained aloof and silent until this moment.  Now he spoke shortly, but he spoke to the point: 

“I for one.”

Thresk turned with a smile upon Pettifer.

“I thought so.  I recognised Mr. Pettifer’s hand in all this.  But he ought to know that the sudden confrontation of a suspected person with unexpected witnesses takes place, in those countries where the method is practised, before the trial; not, as you so ingeniously arranged it this afternoon, two years after the verdict has been given.”

Robert Pettifer turned red.  Then he looked whimsically across the table at his brother-in-law.

“We had better make a clean breast of it, Hazlewood.”

“I think so,” said Thresk gently.

Pettifer came a step nearer.  “We are in the wrong,” he said bluntly.  “But we have an excuse.  Our trouble is very great.  Here’s my brother-in-law to begin with, whose whole creed of life has been to deride the authority of conventional man—­to tilt against established opinion.  Mrs. Ballantyne comes back from her trial in Bombay to make her home again at Little Beeding.  Hazlewood champions her—­not for her sake, but for the sake of his theories.  It pleases his vanity.  Now he can prove that he is not as others are.”

Mr. Hazlewood did not relish this merciless analysis of his character.  He twisted in his chair, he uttered a murmur of protest.  But Robert Pettifer waved him down and continued: 

“So he brings her to his house.  He canvasses for her.  He throws his son in her way.  She has beauty—­she has something more than beauty—­she stands apart as a woman who has walked through fire.  She has suffered very much.  Look at it how one will, she has suffered beyond her deserts.  She has pretty deferential ways which make their inevitable appeal to women as to men.  In a word, Hazlewood sets the ball rolling and it gets beyond his reach.”

Thresk nodded.

“Yes, I understand that.”

“Finally, Hazlewood’s son falls in love with her—­not a boy mind, but a man claiming a man’s right to marry where he loves.  And at once in Hazlewood conventional man awakes.”