Marcella dropped the paper from her hand.

“What does it mean?” she said to her companion.

“Precisely what it says,” replied Anthony, with a nervous impatience he could not repress.  “Now,” he added, as his lameness forced him to sit down, “will you kindly allow me some conversation with you?  It was you—­practically—­who introduced Louis to that man.  You meant well to Louis, and Mr. Wharton has been your friend.  We therefore feel that we owe you some explanation.  For that paragraph”—­he pointed to the paper—­“is, substantially—­Louis’s doing, and mine.”

“Yours?” she said mechanically.  “But Louis has been going on working for the paper—­I persuaded him.”

“I know.  It was not we who actually discovered the thing.  But we set a friend to work.  Louis has had his suspicions all along.  And at last—­by the merest chance—­we got the facts.”

Then he told the story, staring at her the while with his sparkling eyes, his thin invalid’s fingers fidgeting with his hat.  If there was in truth any idea in his mind that the relations between his companion and Harry Wharton were more than those of friendship, it did not avail to make him spare her in the least.  He was absorbed in vindictive feeling, which applied to her also.  He might say for form’s sake that she had meant well; but in fact he regarded her at this moment as a sort of odious Canidia whose one function had been to lure Louis to misfortune.  Cut off himself, by half a score of peculiarities, physical and other, from love, pleasure, and power, Anthony Craven’s whole affections and ambitions had for years centred in his brother.  And now Louis was not only violently thrown out of employment, but compromised by the connection with the Clarion; was, moreover, saddled with a wife—­and in debt.

So that his explanation was given with all the edge he could put upon it.  Let her stop him, if she pleased!—­but she did not stop him.

The facts were these: 

Louis had, indeed, been persuaded by Marcella, for the sake of his wife and bread and butter, to go on working for the Clarion, as a reviewer.  But his mind was all the time feverishly occupied with the apostasy of the paper and its causes.  Remembering Wharton’s sayings and letters throughout the struggle, he grew less and less able to explain the incident by the reasons Wharton had himself supplied, and more and more convinced that there was some mystery behind.

He and Anthony talked the matter over perpetually.  One evening Anthony brought home from a meeting of the Venturists that George Denny, the son of one of the principal employers in the Damesley trade, whose name he had mentioned once before in Marcella’s ears.  Denny was by this time the candidate for a Labour constituency, an ardent Venturist, and the laughing-stock of his capitalist family, with whom, however, he was still on more or less affectionate terms.  His father thought him an incorrigible fool, and his mother wailed over him to her friends.  But they were still glad to see him whenever he would condescend to visit them; and all friction on money matters was avoided by the fact that Denny had for long refused to take any pecuniary help from his father, and was nevertheless supporting himself tolerably by lecturing and literature.