“And Mr. Alton takes it hardly?”

“Tom doesn’t seem to know.  Alton, he thinks, must be beaten, but he told him he meant holding on until the last dollar had gone.  After all, I can’t help feeling sorry for him.  It must be hard to get oneself crippled and then lose everything, while Tom declares there was nothing in that other affair about the girl.”

Alice Deringham said nothing, but Mrs. Forel saw the blood creep into the polished whiteness of her neck, and wished that she would look up.  The girl’s rigid stillness was, she fancied, a trifle unnatural, and suggested that there was a good deal behind it.

“Well,” she said presently, “that is all I know, and I think Tom is waiting for me.”

Mrs. Forel went away, and Alice Deringham sat where she had left her, white in face now, with something that was not wholly unlike horror in her eyes.

“And,” she said, “I kept him.”

Half an hour passed, and she did not move.  Anger against her father and horror of herself were held in check as yet by a tense anxiety as to the end of the struggle she had plunged the man who loved her in.  She could picture him standing with his grave quietness face to face with ruin, and holding on until the last faint hope had gone.  Still, it seemed almost impossible that he should be beaten, and the curious confidence she had had in him reasserted itself and crept as a ray of brightness into the darkness of her humiliation.  That might be borne or grappled with afterwards if Alton came out triumphant, but in the meanwhile she dare not think of herself or what she had done.  Presently there was a tapping at the door, and a maid came in.

“There’s a lady—­Miss Townshead—­waiting to see you, miss,” she said.

Now Alice Deringham was the reverse of a timid woman, but for a few moments she felt her courage fail.  Every instinct in her shrank from that meeting, but the maid had no cause to suspect it when she rose languidly and followed her.  The interview was not of long duration, and nobody ever heard all that passed between the two, but when Seaforth, who had been waiting anxiously, handed Miss Townshead into the cars her eyes were misty.

“Was it very hard?” he said.

“No,” the girl said slowly; “not after the beginning.  I was angry when I went in, and I came away only sorry for her.  There is a great deal more that is lovable in Miss Deringham than I ever fancied there could be.”

“Yes,” said Seaforth sapiently.  “But it’s much better when there’s nothing else, which is the case with somebody I know.  I like my gold free from alloy.”

It was the next day when Deringham found his daughter alone in the sunny corner of the verandah.  He carried a handful of papers, and the girl noticed that while he looked ill and haggard there was relief in his face.  It was, however, with a vacant curiosity she waited for him to speak, for she had risen heavy-eyed and listless after a sleepless night.  Deringham leaned against the balustrade in front of her, and appeared to find it somewhat difficult to begin.