over the explanations possible and the various ways out that might suggest themselves to a fertile brain.  They were not many, and they were not good; the simple truth would probably be best, and that would be so exceedingly compromising under the circumstances that the Van Heigens were hardly likely to find it palatable.  Indeed, he began to see that, even if they two could have presented themselves, as they had first intended, to the anxious family before Denah arrived, it was very doubtful if the matter could have been satisfactorily cleared up to a suspicious and prudish Dutch mind.  The girl was only a companion, a person of no importance, easy to replace; and, no matter how the fact might be explained, it still remained that she had been out all night with an unknown man; one, who, if he were known, would show to be of a position to make the proceeding more compromising still.

At this point Rawson-Clew got up and walked to the window.  It was then that it struck him that he had, in these his mature years, committed an act of stupendous folly, the like of which his youth had never known.

But the girl, what would become of the girl?  In England, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, she would have been dismissed; in Holland that one last hope did not exist.  She would be dismissed with her character considerably damaged and her chance of getting another situation entirely gone.  What would she do?  She had told him yesterday she could not leave, but was obliged to stay on at the Van Heigens’; although she had failed in the first object of her coming, and so had no motive for remaining, she had nowhere else to go.  Perhaps she had quarrelled with her relatives; perhaps they could not afford to keep her—­they were poor enough he knew.  She had once said her eldest sister had lately married the nephew of a bishop; he remembered that, and he also remembered that, after his unfortunate visit to Captain Polkington, he had heard they were people with some good connections.  But that did not mean that they could afford to help this girl, or would be delighted to receive her home under the present conditions.  Rather it indicated that their position was too precarious for them to be able to do it.  They would be bitterly hard on her—­these aspiring people of gentle birth and doubtful shifts, clinging to society by the skin of their teeth, were the hardest of all.  The girl could not go back to them; she could not get anything to do in Holland, or elsewhere—­in Heaven’s name what could she do?

He asked himself the question with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the street.  But the answer did not seem forthcoming.