“I don’t like him any better for meeting him there, my dear.”

“Don’t say that to Walter, Nancy.”

“I have said it.  How Walter can care for those people is a mystery to me.”

“He ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn’t.  Lawson Hannay has been a good friend to him.”

“Do you mean that he’s under any obligation to him?”

“Yes.  Obligations, my dear, that none of us can ever repay.”

“It’s intolerable!” said Anne.

“Is it?  Wait till you know what the obligations are.  That man you dislike so much stood by Walter when your friends the Eliotts, my child, turned their virtuous backs on him—­when none of his own people, even, would lend him a helping hand.  It was Lawson Hannay who saved him.”

“Saved him?”

“Saved him.  Moved heaven and earth to get him out of that woman’s clutches.”

Anne shook her head, and put her hands over her eyes to dispel her vision of him.  Edith laughed.

“You can’t see Mr. Hannay moving heaven?”

“No, really I can’t.”

“Well, I saw him.  At least, if he didn’t move heaven, he moved earth.  When nothing else could shake her hold, he bought her off.”

“Bought—­her—­off?”

“Yes, bought her—­paid her money to go.  And she went.”

“He owes him money, then?”

“Money, and a great many other things beside.  You don’t like it?”

“I can’t bear it.”

“Of course you can’t.  It hurts your pride.  It hurt mine badly.  But my pride has had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay.”

Anne raised her head as if she refused to lower her pride an inch to him.  She was trying to put the whole episode behind her, as it had come before her.  She had nothing whatever to do with it.  Edith, of course, had to be grateful. She was not bound by the same obligation.  But she was determined that they should be quit of the Hannays.  She would make Walter pay back that money.

Meanwhile Edith’s eyes filled with tears at the recollection.  “Lawson Hannay may not have been a very good man himself—­I believe at one time he wasn’t.  But he loved his friend, and he didn’t want to see him going the same way.”

“The same way?  That means that, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Hannay, he would never have met her.”

“Mr. Hannay did his best to prevent his meeting her.  He knew what she was, and Walter didn’t.  He took him off in his yacht for weeks at a time, to get him out of her way.  When she followed him he brought him back.  When she persecuted him—­well, I’ve told you what he did.”

Anne lifted her hand in supplication, and rose and went to the open window, as if, after that recital, she thirsted for fresh air.  Edith smiled, in spite of herself, at her sister-in-law’s repudiation of the subject.

“Poor Mr. Hannay,” said she, “the worst you can say of him now is that he eats and drinks a little more than’s good for him.”