Sir John was duly fetched and carried home jubilant at so rare an attention.  The tie was presented to him on the way, and he bellowed his merriment at its shape and colour.  To her surprise Lady Tamworth found herself defending the style, and inveighing against the monotony of the fashions of the West End.  Nor was this the only occasion on which she disagreed with her husband that evening.  He launched an aphorism across the dinner-table which he had cogitated from the report of a divorce-suit in the evening papers.  “It is a strange thing,” he said, “that the woman who knows her influence over a man usually employs it to hurt him; the woman who doesn’t, employs it unconsciously for his good.”

“You don’t mean that?” she asked earnestly.

“I have noticed it more than once,” he replied.

For a moment Lady Tamworth’s chivalric edifice showed cracks and rents; it threatened to crumble like a house of cards; but only for a moment.  For she merely considered the remark in reference to the future; she applied it to her present wish to exercise an influence over Julian.  The issue of that, however, lay still in the dark, and was consequently imaginable as inclination prompted.  A glance at Sir Julian sufficed to finally reassure her.  He was rosy and modern, and so plainly incapable of appreciating chivalric impulses.  To estimate them rightly one must have an insight into their nature, and therefore an actual experience of their fire; but such fire left traces on the person.  Chivalric people were hollow-cheeked with luminous eyes; at least chivalric men were hollow-cheeked, she corrected herself with a look at the mirror.  At all events Sir John and his aphorism were beneath serious reflection; and she determined to repeat her journey upon the first opportunity.

The opportunity, however, was delayed for a week and occasioned Lady Tamworth no small amount of self-pity.  Here was noble work waiting for her hand, and duty kept her chained to the social oar!

On the afternoon, then, of the following Friday she dressed with what even for her was unusual care, aiming at a complex effect of daintiness and severity, and drove down in a hansom to Whitechapel.  She stopped the cab some yards from the shop and walked up to the window.  Through the glass she could see Julian standing behind the counter.  His hands (she noticed them particularly because he was displaying some cheap skeins of coloured wool) seemed perhaps a trifle thinner and more nervous, his features a little sharpened, and there was a sprinkling of grey in the black of his hair.  For the first time since the conception of her scheme Lady Tamworth experienced a feeling of irresolution.  With Fairholm in the flesh before her eyes, the task appeared difficult; its reality pressed in upon her, driving a breach through the flimsy wall of her fancies.  She resolved to wait until the shop should be empty, and to that end took a few steps slowly up the street and returned yet more slowly.  She looked into the window again; Julian was alone now, and still she hesitated.  The admiring comments of two loungers on the kerb concerning her appearance at last determined her, and she brusquely thrust open the door.  A little bell jangled shrilly above it and Julian looked up.