“He thought us dirt,” she said, sitting on the end of her narrow iron bed.  Then she smiled rather grimly.  “And we are pretty much what he thought us!  Father sponged the money, and I decided to myself that the repaying did not much matter.  We are, as we looked to him, two grubby little people of doubtful honesty, in a grubby room with Bouquet,” and she laughed outright, although she was alone, and the faculty for seeing and deriding herself as others might, had a somewhat bitter flavour.  Nevertheless, she was very angry and quite determined to pay the money somehow, so that at least it should appear to this man that he was mistaken.

An hour later she carried Captain Polkington’s tea down to him; when tea was in the drawing-room his was always sent to him thus.  She found him not depressed at all, on the contrary quite cheerful, and even dignified.  He was reading something when she came in, and seeing that she was alone, he handed it to her.  It was from Mr. Rawson-Clew she found, a sort of recognition of the discharge of the debt, or at least a formal cancelling of it.  It was carefully and conclusively worded, certainly not the unaided work of the young man who had ridden past last night.  It was dictated by the other, she was sure of it; possibly even he had himself discharged the debt so as to end the matter.  Her eyes blazed as she read; he would not even allow her the satisfaction of giving him the lie—­and the misery of straining and pinching to do the impossible.  From pride, or from pity, or from both, he had finished the thing there and then, or he thought he had.  She tore the paper across and then across again.

“What are you doing?” Captain Polkington cried, seizing her hands as she would have torn it again.  “Don’t you know it is valuable?  I must keep it; he can’t go back on it if he wants to.”  He took it from her, and began to piece it together.  “I can look the world in the face again,” he said, admiring the fragments.  “I am free, free and cleared; that debt would have hung like a millstone around my neck, but I am free of it; it is cancelled.”

“Free!” Julia said with scorn.  There are disadvantages in reducing a man to a subordinate position and allowing him no use for his self-respect; it is a virtue that has a tendency to atrophy.  Julia recognised this with something like personal shame.  “Your debt is discharged,” she said gently, “but mine is not; it has been shifted, not cancelled; it lies with me and Mr. Rawson-Clew now, and it shall be paid somehow.”

Captain Polkington hardly heeded what she said; he was still smoothing the pieces of paper.  “What?” he asked, as he put them away in an envelope, but he did not wait for her answer.  “It was very heedless of you to tear it,” he said; “but fortunately there is no damage done; it is perfectly valid, all that can be required.”

CHAPTER III

NARCISSUS TRIANDRUS AZUREUM