“I didn’t,” she declared, indignantly.  “I never took any notice of him at all.  Nothing could have astonished me more than his—­his presumption.”

“And what did you say to him?  Did you box his ears?”

“I was very rude, and that’s partly the trouble now.  I feel as if he’d been nursing a grudge against me all these years—­and was paying it.”

“In that case he’s got you on the hip, hasn’t he?  It’s a lovely turning of the tables.”

“You see that, Cousin Rodney, don’t you?  I couldn’t let a man like that get the upper hand of me.”

“Of course you couldn’t, dear.  I’d sit on him if I were you, and sit on him hard.  I’d knock him flat—­and let Delia Rodman and Clorinda Clay go to the deuce.”

She looked at him wonderingly.  “Let—­who—­go to the deuce?”

“I said Delia Rodman and Clorinda Clay.  I might have included Fanny Burnaby and the Brown girls.  I meant them, of course.  I suppose you’ve been doing a lot of worrying on their account.”

“I—­I haven’t,” she stammered.  “I haven’t thought of them at all.”

“Then I wouldn’t.  They’ve got no legal claim on you whatever.  When they put their money into your father’s hands—­or when other people put it there for them—­they took their chances.  Life is full of risks like that.  You’re not responsible for them, not any more than you are for the fortunes of war.  If they’ve had bad luck, then that’s their own lookout.  Oh, I shouldn’t have them on my mind for a minute.”

She was too startled to suspect him of ruse or strategy.

“I haven’t had them on my mind.  It seems queer—­and yet I haven’t.  Now that you speak of them, of course I see—­” She passed her hand across her brow.  There was a long, meditative silence before she resumed.  “I don’t know what I’ve been dreaming of that it didn’t occur to me before.  Papa and Mr. Davenant both said that I hadn’t considered all the sides to the question; and I suppose that’s what they were thinking of.  It seems so obvious—­now.”

She adjusted her veil and picked up her parasol as though about to take leave; but when she rose it was only to examine, without seeing it, a plaque hanging on the wall.

“If papa were to take Mr. Davenant’s money,” she said, after long silence, without turning round, “then his clients would be as well off as before, wouldn’t they?”

“I presume they would.”

“And now, I suppose, they’re very poor.”

“I don’t know much about that.  None of them were great heiresses, as it was.  Miss Prince, who keeps the school, told your cousin Cherry yesterday that the Rodman girls had written her from Florence, asking if she could give them a job to teach Italian.  They’ll have to teach away like blazes now—­anything and everything they know.”

She turned round toward him, her eyes misty with distress.

“See this bit of jade?” he continued, getting up from his chair.  “Real jade that is.  Cosway, of the Gallery, brought it to me when he came home from Peking.  That’s not real jade you’ve got at Tory Hill.  It’s jadeite.”