Her voice was gentle and even; she spoke with a certain kind of ease.  She appeared to rehearse something already learned by heart.

“So, you see, he didn’t merely lose his own money; he lost theirs—­the money of his clients—­which was in his trust.  I hadn’t heard of it when I wrote you in New York, otherwise I should have told you.  But now that you know it—­”

He looked mystified.  “He’s jolly lucky not to be in England,” he said, trying not to seem as stunned as he felt.  “There that sort of thing is a very serious—­”

“Offence,” she hastened to say.  “Oh, so it is here.  I must tell you quite plainly that if the money hadn’t come papa would have had to go to—­”

“But the money did come?”

She made a point of finishing her sentence.  “If the money hadn’t come papa would have had to go to prison.  Yes, the money did come.  A friend of—­of papa’s—­and Drusilla’s—­advanced it.  It’s been paid over to the people who were going to law.”

“So that part of it is settled?”

“That part of it is settled to the extent that no action will be taken against papa.”

She continued to talk on gently, evenly, giving him the facts unsparingly.  It was the only way.  Her very statements, so it seemed to her, implied that as marriage between them was no longer possible their engagement was at an end.

She was not surprised that he scarcely noticed when, having said all she had to say, she ceased speaking.  Taking it for granted that he was thinking out the most merciful way of putting his verdict into words, she, too, remained silent.  She was not impatient, nor uneasy, nor alarmed.  The fact that the business of telling him was no longer ahead of her, that she had got it over, brought so much relief that she felt able to await his pleasure.

She mistook, however, the nature of his thoughts.  Once he had grasped the gist of her information, he paid little attention to its details.  The important thing was his own conduct.  Amid circumstances overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival, relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.

He used the words “precisely the right thing” because they formed a ruling phrase in his career.  For twenty-odd years they had been written on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows.  They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager countess now deceased.  She had said to his mother, apropos of some forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, “You can always be sure that Rupert will do precisely the right thing.”  Though he was but a lad at Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with all a dowager countess’s authority, that from the moment it was repeated to him by his mother he made it a device.  It had kept him out of more scrapes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the Victoria Cross.