“Oh, mother dear, don’t speak of him!” Drusilla put up her two hands, palms outward, before her averted face, as though to banish the suggestion.  “If you’d ever known him you’d see how impossible—­how impossible—­this kind of situation is for a man like him.  Poor, poor Olivia!  It’s impossible for her, too, I know; but then we Americans—­well, we’re more used to things.  But one thing is certain, anyhow,” she continued, rising in her place on the stairs and stretching out her hand oratorically:  “If this happens I shall never go back to Southsea—­never, never!—­no, nor to Silchester.  With my temperament I couldn’t face it.  My career will be over.  There’ll be nothing left for me, mother dear, but to stay at home with father and you.”

Mrs. Temple rose, sighing heavily.  “Well, I suppose we must go to bed, though I must say it seems harder to do that than almost anything.  None of us’ll sleep.”

“Oh, Peter, won’t you do something?”

Drusilla’s hands were clasped beneath an imploring face, slightly tilted to one side.  Her black hair had begun to tumble to her shoulders.

“I’ll—­I’ll think it over,” was all he could find to answer.

“Oh, thank you, Peter!  I must say it seems like a providence—­your being here.  With my temperament I always feel that there’s nothing like a big strong man to lean on.”

The ladies retired, leaving him to put out the light.  For a long time he stood, as he had entered, just inside the front door leaning on his stick and wearing his hat and overcoat.  He was musing rather than thinking, musing on the odd way in which he seemed almost to have been waited for.  Then, irrelevantly perhaps, there shot across his memory the phrases used by Rodney Temple less than an hour ago: 

“Some call it conscience.  Some call it God.  Some call it neither.  But,” he added, slowly, “some do call it God.”

IV

Closing the door behind his departing guests, Guion stood for a minute, with his hand still on the knob, pressing his forehead against the woodwork.  He listened to the sound of the carriage-wheels die away and to the crunching tread of the two men down the avenue.

“The last Guion has received the last guest at Tory Hill,” he said to himself.  “That’s all over—­all over and done with.  Now!”

It was the hour to which he had been looking forward, first as an impossibility, then as a danger, and at last as an expectation, ever since the day, now some years ago, when he began to fear that he might not be able to restore all the money he had “borrowed” from the properties in his trust.  Having descried it from a long way off, he knew that with reasonable luck it could not overtake him soon.  There were many chances, indeed, that it might never overtake him at all.  Times might change; business might improve; he might come in for the money he expected