“How dreadful!”

“Yes.  Good-night, Rose; do get to bed quickly,—­a wise remark when it is I who have been keeping you up!”

Lady Groombridge, when she got to her own room, murmured to herself: 

“I only stopped just in time.  I nearly said Florence, and that is where the other wicked woman lives.  It’s odd they should both live in Florence.  But—­how absurd, I’m half asleep—­it would be much odder if there were not two wicked women in Florence.”

Sir Edmund was aware as soon as he took his seat by Molly at the breakfast-table that she knew why Lady Groombridge was pouring out tea with a dark countenance.  He put a plate of omelette in his own place, and then asked if Molly needed anything.  As she answered in the negative he murmured as he sat down: 

“Mrs. Delaport Green is not down?”

“She has a furious toothache.”

Molly’s look answered his.

“I suppose there is no such thing as a dentist left in London on Easter Monday?”

No more was safe just then; but by common consent they moved out on to the terrace as soon as they had finished breakfast.

“It is too tiresome, too silly, too wrong,” said Molly.

“Yes; the pet vice should be left at home,” said Edmund.  “Many of them do it because it’s fashionable, but this one must have it in the blood.  I saw her begin to play, and she was a different creature when she touched the cards.  What sort of repentence is there?”

“I found her crying last night like a child, but this morning I see she is going to brazen it out.  But she wants to quarrel with me at once, so I don’t get much confidence.”

“But you don’t mind that?”

“Not in the least, only—­” Molly sighed, but intimate as their tone was, she did not now feel any inclination to reveal her greater troubles.

“I don’t want to end up badly with my first venture, and I have nowhere else to go.  For to-day I think she will talk of going to see the dentist until she finds out how she is treated here.”

“Oh! that will be all right for to-day,” said Edmund.  “There are no possible trains on Bank holiday, and no motor.  Let her get off early to-morrow.”

Molly had evidently sought his opinion as decisive, and she turned as if to go and repeat it to Mrs. Delaport Green.

“But what will you do yourself?” he asked very gently.

“I shall go away with her, and then—­I wonder—­” She hesitated, and looked full into his face.  “Would you be shocked if I took a flat by myself?  I don’t want to hunt for another Mrs. Delaport Green just now.”

Sir Edmund paused.  It struck him for a moment as very tiresome that he should be falling into the position of counsellor and guide to this girl, while he had anything but her prosperity at heart.  He looked at her, and there was in her attitude a pathetic confidence in his judgment.

“I don’t want,” she went on, holding her head very straight and looking away to the wooded hills, “I don’t want to do anything unconventional.”