“Be brave for just a little, Stella.  Once we are married there will be no trouble,” and with his arms about her she was eager to believe.

Stella Ballantyne sat late that night in the armchair in her bedroom, her eyes fixed upon the empty grate, in a turmoil of emotion.  She grew cold and shivered.  A loud noise of birds suddenly burst through the open window.  She went to it.  The morning had come.  She looked across the meadow to the silent house of Little Beeding in the grey broadening light.  All the blinds were down.  Were they all asleep or did one watch like her?  She came back to the fireplace.  In the grate some torn fragments of a letter caught her eyes.  She stooped and picked them up.  They were fragments of the letter of regret which she had written earlier that evening.

“I should have sent it,” she whispered.  “I should not have gone.  I should have sent the letter.”

But the regret was vain.  She had gone.  Her maid found her in the morning lying upon her bed in a deep sleep and still wearing the dress in which she had gone out.

CHAPTER XVII

TROUBLE FOR MR. HAZLEWOOD

When Dick and Stella walked along the drive to the lane Harold Hazlewood, who was radiant at the success of his dinner-party, turned to Robert Pettifer in the hall.

“Have a whisky-and-soda, Robert, before you go,” he said.  He led the way back into the library.  Behind him walked the Pettifers, Robert ill-at-ease and wishing himself a hundred miles away, Margaret Pettifer boiling for battle.  Hazlewood himself dropped into an arm-chair.

“I am very glad that you came to-night, Margaret,” he said boldly.  “You have seen for yourself.”

“Yes, I have,” she replied.  “Harold, there have been moments this evening when I could have screamed.”

Robert Pettifer hurriedly turned towards the table in the far corner of the room where the tray with the decanters and the syphons had been placed.

“Margaret, I pass my life in a scream at the injustice of the world,” said Harold Hazlewood, and Robert Pettifer chuckled as he cut off the end of a cigar.  “It is strange that an act of reparation should move you in the same way.”

“Reparation!” cried Margaret Pettifer indignantly.  Then she noticed that the window was open.  She looked around the room.  She drew up a chair in front of her brother.

“Harold, if you have no consideration for us, none for your own position, none for the neighbourhood, if you will at all costs force this woman upon us, don’t you think that you might still spare a thought for your son?”

Robert Pettifer had kept his eyes open that evening as well as his wife.  He took a step down into the room.  He was anxious to take no part in the dispute; he desired to be just; he was favourably inclined towards Stella Ballantyne; looking at her he had been even a little moved.  But Dick was the first consideration.  He had no children of his own, he cared for Dick as he would have cared for his son, and when he went up each morning by the train to his office in London there lay at the back of his mind the thought that one day the fortune he was amassing would add a splendour to Dick’s career.  Harold Hazlewood alone of the three seemed to have his eyes sealed.