“Good Lord ’” Cai stood erect.  “If—­if—­”

“That’s so,” assented Fancy, seated and nodding.  “If—­”

“But it can’t be!”

“But if it is?” She slipped from her chair and stood, still facing him.

He stared at her blankly.  “Poor old ’Bias!” he murmured.  “But it can’t be.”

“Right O! if you will have it so.  But, you see, I didn’ put the question out o’ curiosity altogether.”

“The question?  What question?”

“Why, about Mrs Bosenna.”

“What has Mrs Bosenna to do with—­Oh, ay, to be sure!  You’re meanin’ that hundred pounds.”  His wits were not very clear for the moment.

“No, I’m not,” said Fancy, moving to the door.  In the act of opening it she paused. “’Twas through you, I reckon, he first trusted master with his money.”

“I—­I never suggested it,” stammered Cai.

“I’m not sayin’ you did,” the girl answered back coldly.  “But he went to master for your sake, because you was his friend and he had such a belief in you.  Just you think that out.”

With a nod of the head she was gone.

Before leaving the house she visited the kitchen, to bid good-night to
Mrs Bowldler.  But Mrs Bowldler was not in the kitchen.

She mounted the stairs and tapped at the door of Palmerston’s attic chamber.

“Hullo!” said she looking in, “what’s become of Geraldine?” (Mrs Bowldler’s Christian name was Sarah, but the two children vied in inventing others more suitable to her gentility).

“If by Geraldine you mean Herm-Intrude,” said Palmerston, sitting up in bed and grinning, “she’s out in the grounds, picking—­”

“Culling,” corrected Fancy.  “Her own word.”

“Well then—­culling lamb mint.”

“I should ha’ thought sage-an’-onions was the stuffin’ relied on by this establishment.”

“Seasonin’,” corrected Palmerston.  “But what have you been doin’ all this time?”

“My dear, don’t ask!” Fancy seated herself at the foot of the bed.  “If you must know, I’ve been playin’ Meddlesome Matty life-size. . . .  These grown-ups are all so helpless—­the men especially! . . .  Feelin’ better?”

“Heaps.  ‘Tis foolishness, keepin’ me in bed like this, and I wish you’d tell her so. I’m all right—­’xcept in my mind.”

“What’s wrong with your mind?”

“‘Shamed o’ myself:  that’s all—­but it’s bad enough.”

“There’s no call to be ashamed.  You did it in absence o’ mind, and all the best authors have suffered from that.  It’s well known.”

“To go through what I did,” said Palmerston bitterly, “just to bring up two-an’-nine!  ’Tis such a waste of material!”

“That’s one way of puttin’ it, to be sure.”

“I mean, for a book—­for’ Pickerley.’  I s’pose there’s not one man in a thousand—­not one liter’y man, anyhow—­has suffered anything like it.  And I can’t put it into the book!”