‘Me!’ She was scared at this result.

‘Yes, you,’ he insisted, full of eagerness.  ’It’s your house.  Ask him to let you have five hundred on the house for a short while.  Tell him we want it.  You can get round him easily enough.’

‘Jack, I can’t do it, really.’

‘Oh yes, you can,’ he assured her.  ’No one better.  He likes you.  He doesn’t like me—­never did.  Ask him for five hundred.  No, ask him for a thousand.  May as well make it a thousand.  It’ll be all the same to him.  You go down in the morning, and do it for me.’

Stanway’s animation became quite cheerful.

‘But about the title—­the flaw?’ she feebly questioned.

‘That won’t frighten uncle,’ said Stanway positively.  ’He knows the title is good enough.  That’s only a technical detail.’

‘Very well,’ she agreed, ‘I’ll do what I can, Jack.’

‘That’s good,’ he said.

And even now, the resolve once made, she did not lose her sense of tranquil optimism, her mild happiness, her widespreading benevolence.  The result of this talk with John aroused in her an innocent vanity, for was it not indirectly due to herself that John had been able to see a way out of his difficulties?

They soon afterwards dismissed the subject, put it with care away in a corner; and John finished his supper.

‘Is Mr. Twemlow still in the district?’ she asked vivaciously.

‘Yes,’ said John, and there was a pause.

‘You’re doing some business together, aren’t you, Jack?’ she hazarded.

John hesitated.  ‘No,’ he said, ’he only wanted to see me about old Twemlow’s estate—­some details he was after.’

‘I felt it,’ she mused.  ’I felt all the time it was that that was wrong.  And John is worrying over it!  But he needn’t—­he needn’t—­and he doesn’t know!’

She exulted.

She could read plainly the duplicity in his face.  She knew that he had done some wicked thing, and that all his life was a maze of more or less equivocal stratagems.  But she was so used to the character of her husband that this aspect of the situation scarcely impressed her.  It was her new active beneficent interference in John’s affairs that seemed to occupy her thoughts.

‘I told you I wouldn’t say anything about Ethel’s affair,’ said John later, ‘and I won’t.’  He was once more judicial and pompous.  ’But, of course, you will look after it.  I shall leave it to you to deal with.  You’ll have to be firm, you know.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

* * * * *

Not till after breakfast the next day did Leonora realise the utter repugnance with which she shrank from the mission to Uncle Meshach.  She had declined to look the project fairly in the face, to examine her own feelings concerning it.  She had said to herself when she awoke in the dark:  ’It is nothing.  It is a mere business matter.  It isn’t like begging.’  But the idea,