The man moving about the room was perhaps the thing she feared and hated most in the world.  Every scene of this kind—­and he forced them on her, in spite of her futile resistance, at fairly frequent intervals—­represented to her an hour of torture and humiliation.  How to hide the scenes and the being who caused them, from her husband, her servants, her friends, was becoming almost her chief preoccupation.  She was beginning to be afraid of her brother.  For some time she had regarded him as incipiently insane, and as she watched him this evening he seemed to her more than ever charged with sinister possibilities.  It appeared to be impossible to influence or frighten him; and she realized that as he seemed not to care a fig whether she caused a scandal or not, and she cared with every pulse of her being, she was really in his power, and it was no good struggling.

“Well, good-night, Edith,” he said at last, taking up his hat.  “This’ll last for a bit—­but not very long, I warn you—­prices being what they are.  Oh, by the way, my name just now is Wilson—­make a note of it!”

“What’s that for?” she said disdainfully.

“Some Canadian creditors of mine got wind of me—­worse luck.  I had to change my quarters, and drop the old name—­for a bit.  However—­what’s in a name?” He laughed, and held out his hand.

“Going to shake hands, Edie?  You used to be awfully fond of me, when you were small.”

She stood, apparently unmoved, her hands hanging.  The pathetic note had been tried on her too often.

“Good-night, Roger.  Nannie will show you out.”

The door closed on him, and Lady Winton dropped on a sofa by the fire, her face showing white and middle-aged in the firelight.  She was just an ordinary woman, only with a stronger will than most; and as an ordinary woman, amid all her anger and fear, she was not wholly proof against such a spectacle as that now presented by her once favourite brother.  It was not his words that affected her—­but a hundred little personal facts which every time she saw him burnt a little more deeply into her consciousness the irreparableness of his personal ruin—­physical and moral.  Idleness, drink, disease—­the loss of shame, of self-respect, of manners—­the sense of something vital gone for ever—­all these fatal things stared out upon her, from his slippery emaciated face, his borrowed clothes, his bullying voice—­the scent on him of the mews in which he lived!

She covered her face with her hands and cried a little.  She could remember when he was the darling and pride of the family—­especially of his father.  How had it happened?  He had said to her once, “There must have been a black drop somewhere in our forbears, Edie.  It has reappeared in me.  We are none of us responsible, my dear, for our precious selves.  I may be a sinner and a loafer—­but that benevolent Almighty of yours made me.”

That was wicked stuff, of course; but there had been a twist in him from the beginning.  Had she done her best for him?  There were times when her conscience pricked her.