“As I said, ma’am, I am an easy-going man.  I really have not a spice of the tyrant in me.  An intemperate creature held by the collar may have that notion of me, while pulling to be released as promptly as it entered the noose.  But I do strictly and sternly object to the scandal of violent separations, open breaches of solemn engagements, a public rupture.  Put it that I am the cause, I will not consent to a violation of decorum.  Is that clear?  It is just possible for things to be arranged so that all parties may be happy in their way without much hubbub.  Mind, it is not I who have willed it so.  I am, and I am forced to be, passive.  But I will not be obstructive.”

He paused, waving his hand to signify the vanity of the more that might be said.

Some conception of him, dashed by incredulity, excited the lady’s intelligence.

“Well!” she exclaimed, “you have planted me in the land of conjecture.  As my husband used to say, I don’t see light, but I think I see the lynx that does.  We won’t discuss it at present.  I certainly must be a younger woman than I supposed, for I am learning hard.—­Here comes the Professor, buttoned up to the ears, and Dr. Middleton flapping in the breeze.  There will be a cough, and a footnote referring to the young lady at the station, if we stand together, so please order my carriage.”

“You found Clara complacent? roguish?”

“I will call to-morrow.  You have simplified my task, Sir Willoughby, very much; that is, assuming that I have not entirely mistaken you.  I am so far in the dark that I have to help myself by recollecting how Lady Busshe opposed my view of a certain matter formerly.  Scepticism is her forte.  It will be the very oddest thing if after all . . . !  No, I shall own, romance has not departed.  Are you fond of dupes?”

“I detest the race.”

“An excellent answer.  I could pardon you for it.”  She refrained from adding, “If you are making one of me.”

Sir Willoughby went to ring for her carriage.

She knew.  That was palpable:  Clara had betrayed him.

“The earlier Colonel De Craye leaves Patterne Hall the better:”  she had said that:  and, “all parties would be happier for an excursion.”  She knew the position of things and she guessed the remainder.  But what she did not know, and could not divine, was the man who fenced her.  He speculated further on the witty and the dull.  These latter are the redoubtable body.  They will have facts to convince them:  they had, he confessed it to himself, precipitated him into the novel sphere of his dark hints to Mrs. Mountstuart; from which the utter darkness might allow him to escape, yet it embraced him singularly, and even pleasantly, with the sense of a fact established.

It embraced him even very pleasantly.  There was an end to his tortures.  He sailed on a tranquil sea, the husband of a stedfast woman—­no rogue.  The exceeding beauty of stedfastness in women clothed Laetitia in graces Clara could not match.  A tried stedfast woman is the one jewel of the sex.  She points to her husband like the sunflower; her love illuminates him; she lives in him, for him; she testifies to his worth; she drags the world to his feet; she leads the chorus of his praises; she justifies him in his own esteem.  Surely there is not on earth such beauty!