There was silence a moment.  After which Doris said, with a cold decision: 

“You can’t imagine how absurd it seems to me that you should come and ask me to help Lady Dunstable with her son.  There is nobody in the world less helpless than Lady Dunstable, and nobody who would be less grateful for being helped.  I really cannot meddle with it.”

She rose as she spoke, and Miss Wigram rose too.

“Couldn’t you—­couldn’t you—­” said the girl pleadingly—­“just ask Mr. Meadows to warn Lord Dunstable?  I’m thinking of the villagers, and the farmers, and the schools—­all the people we used to love.  Father was there twenty years!  To think of the dear place given over—­some day—­to that creature!”

Her charming eyes actually filled with tears.  Doris was touched, but at the same time set on edge.  This loyalty that people born and bred in the country feel to our English country system—­what an absurd and unreal frame of mind!  And when our country system produces Lady Dunstables!

“They have such a pull!”—­she thought angrily—­“such a hideously unfair pull, over other people!  The way everybody rushes to help them when they get into a mess—­to pick up the pieces—­and sweep it all up!  It’s irrational—­it’s sickening!  Let them look after themselves—­and pay for their own misdeeds like the rest of us.”

“I can’t interfere—­I really can’t!” she said, straightening her slim shoulders.  “It is not as though we were old friends of Lord and Lady Dunstable.  Don’t you see how very awkward it would be?  Let me advise you just to watch the thing a little, and then to apply to somebody in the Crosby Ledgers neighbourhood.  You must have some friends or acquaintances there, who at any rate could do more than we could.  And perhaps after all it’s a mare’s nest, and the young man doesn’t mean to marry her at all!”

The girl’s anxious eyes scanned Doris’s unyielding countenance; then with a sigh she gave up her attempt, and said “Good-bye.”  Doris went with her to the door.

“We shall meet to-morrow, shan’t we?” she said, feeling a vague compunction.  “And I suppose this woman will be there again.  You can keep an eye on her.  Are you living alone—­or are you with friends?”

“Oh, I’m in a boarding-house,” said Miss Wigram, hastily.  Then as though she recognised the new softness in Doris’s look, she added, “I’m quite comfortable there—­and I’ve a great deal of work.  Good night.”

* * * * *

“All alone!—­with that gentle face—­and that terrible amount of conscience—­hard lines!” thought Doris, as she reflected on her visitor.  “I felt a black imp beside her!”

All the same, the letter which Mrs. Meadows received by the following morning’s post was not at all calculated to melt the “black imp” further.  Arthur wrote in a great hurry to beg that she would not go on with their Welsh plans—­for the moment.