Mrs. Pettifer accepted it at once.  She had not been idle since Dick had left her.  Before he had come she had merely looked upon the crusade as one of Harold Hazlewood’s stupendous follies.  But after he had gone she was genuinely horrified.  She saw Dick speaking with the set dogged look and the hard eyes which once or twice she had seen before.  He had always got his way, she remembered, on those occasions.  She drove round to her friends and made inquiries.  At each house her terrors were confirmed.  It was Dick now who led the crusade.  He had given up his polo, he was spending all his leave at Little Beeding and most of it with Stella Ballantyne.  He lent her a horse and rode with her in the morning, he rowed her on the river in the afternoon.  He bullied his friends to call on her.  He brandished his friendship with her like a flag.  Love me, love my Stella was his new motto.  Mrs. Pettifer drove home with every fear exaggerated.  Dick’s career would be ruined altogether—­even if nothing worse were to happen.  To any view that Stella Ballantyne might hold she hardly gave a thought.  She was sure of what it would be.  Stella Ballantyne would jump at her nephew.  He had good looks, social position, money and a high reputation.  It was the last quality which would give him a unique value in Stella Ballantyne’s eyes.  He was not one of the chinless who haunt the stage doors; nor again one of that more subtly decadent class which seeks to attract sensation by linking itself to notoriety.  No.  From Stella’s point of view Dick Hazlewood must be the ideal husband.

Mrs. Pettifer waited for her husband’s return that evening with unusual impatience, but she was wise enough to hold her tongue until dinner was over and he with a cigar between his lips and a glass of old brandy on the table-cloth in front of him, disposed to amiability and concession.

Then, however, she related her troubles.

“You see it must be stopped, Robert.”

Robert Pettifer was a lean wiry man of fifty-five whose brown dried face seemed by a sort of climatic change to have taken on the colour of the binding of his law-books.  He, too, was a little troubled by the story, but he was of a fair and cautious mind.

“Stopped?” he said.  “How?  We can’t arrest Mrs. Ballantyne again.”

“No,” replied Mrs. Pettifer.  “Robert, you must do something.”

Robert Pettifer jumped in his chair.

“I, Margaret!  Lord love you, no!  I decline to mix myself up in the matter at all.  Dick’s a grown man and Mrs. Ballantyne has been acquitted.”

Margaret Pettifer knew her husband.

“Is that your last word?” she asked ruefully.

“Absolutely.”

“It isn’t mine, Robert.”

Robert Pettifer chuckled and laid a hand upon his wife’s.

“I know that, Margaret.”

“We are going to dine next Friday night at Little Beeding to meet Stella Ballantyne.”