Sir Charles swung round alertly to his companion.  To him at all events the topic was not an indifferent one.

“Yet you say, you believe that he is void of the natural affections.  Last night we saw a proof, a crazy proof if you will, but none the less a proof of his devotion to his daughter.  To-day you give me as sure a one of his devotion to his dead wife,” and almost before he had finished, Mr. Mardale was calling to him from the steps of the house.

He spent all that morning in the great drawing-room on the first floor.  It was a room of rich furniture, grown dingy with dust and inattention, and crowded from end to end with tables and chairs and sofas, on which were heaped in a confused medley, pictures, statues of marble, fans and buckles from Spain, queer barbaric ornaments, ivory carvings from the Chinese.  Sir Charles could hardly make his way to the little cleared space by the window, where Mr. Mardale worked, without brushing some irreplaceable treasure to the floor.  Once there he was fettered for the morning.  Mr. Mardale with all the undisciplined enthusiasm of an amateur, jumping from this invention to that, beaming over his spectacles.  Sir Charles listened with here and there a word of advice, or of sympathy with the labour of creation.  But his thoughts were busy elsewhere, he was pondering over his discovery of the morning, over the sight which he and Jerkley had seen last night, he was accustoming himself to regard the old man in a strange new light, as an over-careful father and a sorely-stricken husband.  Meanwhile he sat over against the window which was in the side of the house, and since the house was built upon a slope of hill, although the window was on the first floor, a broad terrace of grass stretched away from it to a circle of gravel ornamented with statues.  On this terrace he saw Mrs. Lashley, and reflected uncomfortably that he must meet her at dinner and again sustain the inquiry of her eyes.

He avoided actual questions, however, and as soon as dinner was over, with a meaning look at the girl to assure her that he was busy with her business, he retired to the library.  Then he sat himself down to think the matter over restfully.  But the room, walled with books upon its three sides, fronted the Southwest on its fourth, and as the afternoon advanced, the hot June sun streamed farther and farther into the room.  Sir Charles moved his chair back, and again back, and again, until at last it was pushed into the one cool dark corner of the room.  Then Sir Charles closed his wearied eyes the better to think.  But he had slept little during the last night, and when he opened them again, it was with a guilty start.  He rubbed his eyes, then he reached a hand down quickly at his side, and lifted a book out of the lowest shelf in the corner.  The book was a volume of sermons.  Sir Charles replaced it, and again dipped his hand into the lucky-bag.  He drew out a tome of Mr. Hobbes’ philosophy; Sir Charles was not in the