“And there are your books there, I see!” she said, in her positive, calm voice, pointing to a few hundred books that were stacked in a corner.  “How lovely!  You remember you promised to lend me that book of Thoreau’s—­what did you call it?—­and you never did!”

“Next time you come I’ll find it for you,” said Helen.

Next time she came!  This kind of visit would occur frequently, then!  They were talking just as if James Ollerenshaw had been in Timbuctoo, instead of by the mantelpiece, when Sally suddenly turned on him.

“It must be very nice for you to have Nell like this!” She addressed him with a glowing smile.

They had never been introduced!  A week ago they had passed each other in St. Luke’s-square without a sign.  Of the Swetnam family, James “knew” the father alone, and him slightly.  What chiefly impressed him in Sarah was her nerve.  He said nothing; he was tongue-tied.

“It’s a great change for you,” proceeded Sarah.

“Ay,” he agreed; “it’s that.”

CHAPTER X

A CALL

The next moment the two fluffy women had decided, without in the least consulting James, that they would ascend to Helen’s bedroom to look at a hat which, James was surprised to learn, Helen had seen in Brunt’s window that morning and had bought on the spot.  No wonder she had been in a hurry to go marketing; no wonder she had spent “some” of his ten-pound note!  He had seen hats in Brunt’s marked as high as two guineas; but he had not dreamt that such hats would ever enter his house.  While he had been labouring, collecting his rents and arranging for repairs, throughout the length and the breadth of Bursley and Turnhill, she, under pretence of marketing, had been flinging away ten-pound notes at Brunt’s.  The whole business was fantastic, simply and madly fantastic; so fantastic that he had not yet quite grasped the reality of it!  The whole business was unheard of.  He saw, with all the clearness of his masculine intellect, that it must cease.  The force with which he decided within himself that it must cease—­and instanter!—­bordered upon the hysterical.  As he had said, plaintively, he was an oldish man.  His habits, his manners, and his notions, especially his notions about money, were fixed and set like plaster of Paris in a mould.  Helen’s conduct was nothing less than dangerous.  It might bring him to a sudden death from heart disease.  Happily, he had had a very good week indeed with his rents.  He trotted about all day on Mondays and on Tuesday mornings, gathering his rents, and on Tuesday afternoons he usually experienced the assuaged content of an alligator after the weekly meal.  Otherwise there was no knowing what might not have been the disastrous consequences of Helen’s barefaced robbery and of her unscrupulous, unrepentant defence of that robbery.  For days and days he had imagined himself in heaven with a seraph who was also a good cook.  He had forty times congratulated himself on catching Helen.  And now...!