When he reached his house his wife hurried forward to meet him.  Already she had the news.  There was an excitement in her face not to be misunderstood.  The futile time-honoured phrase of triumph so ready on the lips of those who have prophesied evil was trembling upon hers.

“Don’t say it, Margaret,” said Pettifer very seriously.  “We have come to a pass where light words will lead us astray.  Hazlewood has been with me.  I have the reports of the trial here.”

Margaret Pettifer put a check upon her tongue and they dined together almost in complete silence.  Pettifer was methodically getting his own point of view quite clearly established in his mind, so that whatever he did or advised he might be certain not to swerve from it afterwards.  He weighed his inclinations and his hopes, and when the servants had left the dining-room and he had lit his cigar he put his case before his wife.

“Listen, Margaret!  You know your brother.  He is always in extremes.  He swings from one to the other.  He is terrified now lest this marriage should take place.”

“No wonder,” interposed Mrs. Pettifer.

Pettifer made no comment upon the remark.

“Therefore,” he continued, “he is anxious that I should discover in these reports some solid reason for believing that the verdict which acquitted Stella Ballantyne was a grave miscarriage of justice.  For any such reason must have weight.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Pettifer.

“And will justify him—­this is his chief consideration—­in withholding publicly his consent.”

“I see.”

Only a week ago Dick himself had observed that sentimental philosophers had a knack of breaking their heads against their own theories.  The words had been justified sooner than she had expected.  Mrs. Pettifer was not surprised at Harold Hazlewood’s swift change any more than her husband had been.  Harold, to her thinking, was a sentimentalist and sentimentality was like a fir-tree—­a thing of no deep roots and easily torn up.

“But I do not take that view, Margaret,” continued her husband, and she looked at him with consternation.  Was he now to turn champion, he who only yesterday had doubted?  “And I want you to consider whether you can agree with me.  There is to begin with the woman herself, Stella Ballantyne.  I saw her for the first time yesterday, and to be quite honest I liked her, Margaret.  Yes.  It seemed to me that there was nothing whatever of the adventuress about her.  And I was impressed—­I will go further, I was moved—­dry-as-dust old lawyer as I am, by something—­How shall I express it without being ridiculous?” He paused and searched in his vocabulary and gave up the search.  “No, the epithet which occurred to me yesterday at the dinner-table and immediately, still seems to me the only true one—­I was moved by something in this woman of tragic experiences which was strangely virginal.”