And he was right.  Miss Ironsyde welcomed him kindly, but left no shadow of doubt as to her opinion; and the fact that the situation had been complicated by publicity, which in the last resort he argued, by no means turned her from her ultimatum.

“Sit down and smoke and listen to me, Raymond,” she began, after kissing him.  “I forgive you, once for all, that you could be so rude to me and fail to see me despite my very pressing letter.  No doubt some whim or suspicion inspired you to be unkind.  But that doesn’t matter now.  That’s a trifle.  We’ve got to thresh out something that isn’t a trifle, however, for your honour and good name are both involved—­and with yours, ours.”

“I argue that a great deal too much is being made of this, Aunt Jenny.”

“I hope so—­I hope everything has been exaggerated through a misunderstanding.  Delay in these cases is often simply fatal, Raymond, because it gives a lie a start.  And if you give a lie a start, it’s terribly hard to catch.  Sabina Dinnett came to see me on Sunday afternoon and I trust with all my heart she told me what wasn’t true.”

He felt a sudden gleam of hope and she saw it.

“Don’t let any cheerful feeling betray you; this is far from a cheerful subject for any of us.  But again, I say, I hope that Sabina Dinnett has come to wrong conclusions.  What she said was this.  Trust me to be accurate, and when I have done, correct her statement if it is false.  Frankly, I thought her a highly intelligent young woman, with grace of mind and fine feeling.  She was fighting for her future and she did it like a gentlewoman.”

Miss Ironsyde then related her conversation with Sabina and Raymond knew it to be faithful in every particular.

“Is that true, or isn’t it?” she concluded.

“Yes, it’s perfectly true, save in her assumption that I had changed my mind,” he said.  “What I may have done since, doesn’t matter; but when I left her, I had not changed my mind in the least; if she had waited for me to act in my own time, and come to see you, and so on, as I meant to do, and broken it to Daniel myself, instead of hearing him break it to me and dismiss me as though I were a drunken groom, then I should have kept my word to her.  But these things, and her action, and the fact that she and her fool of a mother have bleated the story all over the county—­these things have decided me it would be a terrible mistake to marry Sabina now.  She’s not what I thought.  Her true character is not trustworthy—­in fact—­well, you must see for yourself that they don’t trust me and are holding a pistol to my head.  And no man is going to stand that.  We could never be married now, because she hates me.  There’s another reason too—­a practical one.”

“What?”

“Why, the best.  I’m a pauper.  Daniel has chucked me out of the works.”

Miss Ironsyde showed very great distress.

“Do you honestly mean that you could look the world in the face if you ruin this woman?”