The next morning I gave my servants a months’ notice.  Rogers, who had been with me for many years, behaved in the correctest manner.  He neither offered to lend me his modest savings nor to work for me for no wages.  He expressed his deep regret at leaving my service and his confidence that I would give him a good character.  Bingley wept after the way of women.  There was also a shadowy housemaidy young person in a cap who used to make meteoric appearances and whom I left to the diplomacy of Bingley.  These dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale.  It was all exceedingly unpleasant.  The agent was so anxious to let my chambers, the auctioneer so delighted at the chance of selling my effects, that I felt myself forthwith turned neck and crop out of doors.  It was a bright morning in early spring, with a satirical touch of hope in the air.  London, no longer to be my London, maintained its hostile attitude to me.  If any one had prophesied that I should be a stranger in Piccadilly, I should have laughed aloud.  Yet I was.

Walking moodily up Saint James’s street I met the omniscient and expansive Renniker.  He gave me a curt nod and a “How d’ye do?” and passed on.  I felt savagely disposed to slash his jaunty silk hat off with my walking-stick.  A few months before he would have rushed effusively into my arms and bedaubed me with miscellaneous inaccuracies of information.  At first I was furiously indignant.  Then I laughed, and swinging my stick, nearly wreaked my vengeance on a harmless elderly gentleman.

It was my first experience of social ostracism.  Although I curled a contumelious lip, I smarted under the indignity.  It was all very well to say proudly “io son’ io”; but io used to be a person of some importance who was not cavalierly “how d’ye do’d” by creatures like Renniker.  This and the chance encounters of the next few weeks gave me furiously to think.  I knew that in one respect my sister Agatha was right.  These good folks who shied now at the stains of murder with which my reputation was soiled would in time get used to them and eventually forget them altogether.  But I reflected that I should not forget, and I determined that I should not be admitted on sufferance, as at first I should have to be admitted, into any man’s club or any woman’s drawing-room.

One day Colonel Ellerton, Maisie Ellerton’s father, called on me.  He used to be my very good friend; we sat on the same side of the House and voted together on innumerable occasions in perfect sympathy and common lack of conviction.  He was cordial enough, congratulated me on my marvellous restoration to health, deplored my absence from Parliamentary life, and then began to talk confusedly of Russia.  It took a little perspicacity to see that something was weighing on the good man’s mind; something he had come to say and for his honest life could not get out.  His plight became more pitiable as the interview proceeded, and when he rose to go, he grew as red as a turkey-cock and began to sputter.  I went to his rescue.