“That’s all very well, my dear Mrs. Wilcox, but in the meanwhile people will talk.”

“That won’t break Molly’s heart.  She’d snap her fingers at them.  And the more they talk, the more she’ll go her own way.  That’s Molly all over.  You can’t turn her by talking, but she’d go through fire and water for any one she loves.”

Poor vulgar, silly Mrs. Wilcox!  But try her on the subject of her daughter, and she rang true.

Miss Batchelor smiled.  She didn’t know about going through fire; but Mrs. Nevill had certainly been playing with the element, and got her fingers badly scorched too.

“Well,” said she, “of course, so long as Mrs. Nevill Tyson doesn’t break her heart over it.”

“Does it look as if she were breaking her heart?  Five theatres in one week.”

“No; I can’t say I think it does.”

“Shockingly dissipated, isn’t she?”

“Well—­rather more dissipated than we are in Drayton Parva.  You must miss her dreadfully, Mrs. Wilcox?”

“I don’t mind that so long as she’s happy.  You see, it’s not as if she hadn’t friends.  I know she’s well looked after.”

Mrs. Wilcox felt that she was making a remarkably good case of it.  And she had not once mentioned Sir Peter.

All was well so long as you did not mention Sir Peter.

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Of course I want her to get away out of it all.  I know that people are making very strange remarks about her staying—­”

“They might make stranger remarks if she came, that’s one consolation.  Still—­”

“Well, Miss Batchelor, the child is perfectly willing to come if I want her.  But—­er—­er—­a friend”—­(Mrs. Wilcox was determined to be discreet, and leave no loophole for scandal)—­“a friend has strongly advised her to stay.”

“Oh, no doubt she is perfectly right.  Sir Peter is in town again, I believe?”

Miss Batchelor said it abruptly, as if she were trying to change the subject.  And at the mention of Sir Peter Mrs. Wilcox lost her head and fluttered into the trap.  There are fallacies in the logic of facts.

“No, no,” she said, getting up to go.  “It was Captain Stanistreet I meant.”

Again Miss Batchelor smiled.

This was proof positive—­the last stone.

CHAPTER XIV

THE “CRITERION”

Mrs. Nevill’s account of herself, though somewhat highly colored, was substantially true.  When Stanistreet suggested defeat, it was his first allusion to her husband’s desertion of her; and like most of Louis’s utterances, it was full of tact.

Defeat?  She had brooded over the idea, and then apparently she had an inspiration.