Dick Ransome turned on his sister-in-law a pale, puffy face in which two little dark eyes twinkled with a shrewd, gross humour.  Nothing could possibly have pleased Dick Ransome more than an exhibition of indignant virtue, as achieved by Sarah.  He knew a great deal more about Sarah than Mrs. Ransome knew, or than Sarah knew herself.  To Dick Ransome’s mind, thus illumined by knowledge, that spectacle swept the whole range of human comedy.  He sat taking in all the entertainment it presented; and, when it was all over, he remarked quietly that Toodles needn’t bother about her proofs.  He had got them too.  He knew that it was not so.  He could tell her that much, but he wasn’t going to give Majendie away.  No, she couldn’t get any more out of him than that.

Sarah smiled.  She did not need to get anything more out of him.  She had her proof; or, if it didn’t exactly amount to proof, she had her clue.  She had found it long ago; and she had followed it up, if not to the end, at any rate, quite far enough.  She reflected that Majendie, like the dear fool he always was, had given it to her himself, five years ago.

Men’s sins take care of themselves.  It is their innocent good deeds that start the hounds of destiny.  When Majendie sent Maggie Forrest’s handiwork to Mrs. Ransome, with a kind note recommending the little embroideress, by that innocent good deed he woke the sleeping dogs of destiny.  Mrs. Ransome’s sister had tracked poor Maggie down by the long trail of her beautiful embroidery.  She had been baffled when the embroidered clue broke off.  Now, after three years, she leaped (and it was not a very difficult leap for Lady Cayley) to the firm conclusion.  Maggie Forrest and her art had disappeared for three years; so, at perilous intervals, had Majendie; therefore they had disappeared together.

Sarah did not like the look in Dick Ransome’s eye.  She removed herself from it to the seclusion of her bedroom.  There she bathed her heated face with toilette vinegar, steadied her nerves with a cigarette, lay down on a couch and rested, and, pure from passion, revised the situation calmly.  She was an eminently practical, sensible woman, who knew the facts of life, and knew, also, how to turn them to her own advantage.

Seen by the larger, calmer spirit that was Sarah now, the situation was not as unpleasant as it had at first appeared.  To be sure, the rumour in which she had figured was fatal to the matrimonial vision, and to the beautiful illusion of propriety in which she had once lived.  But Sarah had renounced the vision; she had abandoned the pursuit of the fugitive propriety.  She had long ago seen through the illusion.  She might be a deceiver, but she had no power to hoodwink her own indestructible lucidity.  Looking back on her life, after the joyous romances of her youth, the years had passed like so many funeral processions, each bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial.  Then there had come the dreary funeral feast, and