“He may be led into taking into consideration the fact that he has cut the ground from under a fellow’s feet and left him dangling in the air,” said Osborn to his wife.  “Best thing will be to make friends with the woman, hang her!”

“Yes, Alec, yes,” Hester Osborn answered, just a little feverishly.  “We must make friends with her.  They say she is a good sort and was frightfully poor herself.”

“She won’t be poor now, hang her!” remarked Captain Osborn with added fervour.  “I should like to break her neck!  I wonder if she rides?”

“I’m sure she has not been well enough off to do anything like that.”

“Good idea to begin to teach her.”  And he laughed as he turned on his heel and began to walk the deck with a fellow passenger.

It was these people Lord Walderhurst had come to prepare her for.

“Maria has told you about them, I know,” he said.  “I dare say she has been definite enough to explain that I consider Osborn altogether undesirable.  Under the veneer of his knowledge of decent customs he is a cad.  I am obliged to behave civilly to the man, but I dislike him.  If he had been born in a low class of life, he would have been a criminal.”

“Oh!” Emily exclaimed.

“Any number of people would be criminals if circumstances did not interfere.  It depends a good deal on the shape of one’s skull.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Emily again, “do you think so?”

She believed that people who were bad were bad from preference, though she did not at all understand the preference.  She had accepted from her childhood everything she had ever heard said in a pulpit.  That Walderhurst should propound ideas such as ministers of the Church of England might regard as heretical startled her, but he could have said nothing startling enough to shake her affectionate allegiance.

“Yes, I do,” he answered.  “Osborn’s skull is quite the wrong shape.”

But when, a short time after, Captain Osborn brought the skull in question into the room, covered in the usual manner with neatly brushed, close-cropped hair, Emily thought it a very nice shape indeed.  Perhaps a trifle hard and round-looking and low of forehead, but not shelving or bulging as the heads of murderers in illustrated papers generally did.  She owned to herself that she did not see what Lord Walderhurst evidently saw, but then she did not expect of herself an intelligence profound enough to follow his superior mental flights.

Captain Osborn was well groomed and well mannered, and his demeanour towards herself was all that the most conventional could have demanded.  When she reflected that she herself represented in a way the possible destruction of his hopes of magnificent fortune, she felt almost tenderly towards him, and thought his easy politeness wonderful.  Mrs. Osborn, too!  How interesting and how beautiful in an odd way Mrs. Osborn was!  Every movement of her exceeding slimness