After that the visitor could not reasonably do anything but inquire if Mr. Smith was going to throw up the South African post which all the town knew he was about to take before his engagement.

To this Mr. Polkington was obliged to answer, “No, he is going, and going almost directly; that is my one hardship; I have got to lose Cherie at once, for he positively will not go without her.  Of course, it would be a thousand pities for him to throw it up, such an opening; so very much better than he would ever have here, but it is hard to lose my child—­she seems a child to me still—­almost before I have realised that she is grown up.  Their passages are taken already; they will be married by license almost directly; there even won’t be time to get a trousseau, only the merest necessaries before the luggage has to go.”

It must not be thought that the news of Mr. Harding’s engagement was the one and only thing which convinced Mrs. Polkington and Cherie that the great campaign had failed; it was the finishing touch, no doubt, in that it had made Cherie feel the necessity of being immediately engaged to some one, but there were other things at work.  Captain Polkington had returned from London just five days before they heard the news, and three were quite sufficient to show his wife and daughter that he was considerably the worse for his stay in town.  Bills too, had been coming in of late; not inoffensive, negligible bills such as they were very well used to, but threatening insistent bills, one even accompanied by a lawyer’s letter.  Then, to crown all, Captain Polkington had a fit of virtue and repentance on the second day after his return.  It was not of long duration, and was, no doubt, partly physical, and not unconnected with the effects of his decline from the paths of temperance.  But while it lasted, he read some of the bills and talked about the way ruin stared him in the face and the need there was for retrenchment, turning over a new leaf, facing facts and kindred things.  Also, which was more important, he wrote to his wife’s banker brother—­he who had been instrumental in getting the papers sent in years ago.  To this influential person he said a good deal about the state of the family finances, the need there was for clearing matters up and starting on a better basis, and his own determination to face things fairly and set to work in earnest.  What kind of work was not mentioned; apparently that had nothing to do with the Captain’s resolution; there was one thing, however, that was mentioned definitely—­the need for the banker brother’s advice—­and pecuniary assistance.  The answer to this letter was received on the same day as the news of Mr. Harding’s engagement.  It came in the evening, later than the news, and it was addressed to Mrs. Polkington, not the Captain; it assisted her in recognising that the end of the campaign had arrived.  It said several unpleasant things, and it said them plainly; not the most pleasant to the reader was the announcement that the writer would himself come to Marbridge to look into matters one day that week or the next.  Under these circumstances it is not perhaps so surprising that Cherie found it advisable to accept Mr. Brendon Smith’s offer of marriage, and Mrs. Polkington found the impossibility of getting a trousseau in time no very great disadvantage.