‘I think not.  The proper name, if you please.’

Dymes took the rebuke good-humouredly.  When their conversation was over, he wished her to go with him to a restaurant for tea; but Alma insisted on catching a certain train at Baker Street, and Dymes had to be satisfied with the promise of another interview shortly.

CHAPTER 9

A visit was due from Mrs. Frothingham, who had not been seen at Pinner for more than six months.  She would have come at New Year, but an attack of influenza upset her plans.  Now she wrote to announce her arrival on Saturday.

‘I wish it had been Monday,’ said Alma; ’I have to go to the Crystal Palace.’

‘Is it imperative?’ asked her husband.

’Yes; there’s something new of Sterndale Bennett’s, and I’ve asked Dora.’

It seemed to Harvey that this arrangement might have been put aside without great inconvenience, but, as usual, he made no comment.  As he would be in town on Saturday, he promised to meet their visitor at Waterloo.  Alma, he thought, had never shown much gratitude for her step-mother’s constant kindness; during the past half-year she had now and then complained of the trouble of answering Mrs. Frothingham’s letters, and the news of illness at Basingstoke drew from her only a few words of conventional sympathy.  To Hughie, who frequently received presents from ‘Grandmamma’, she rarely spoke of the affectionate giver.  A remark of hers recently on some piece of news from Mrs. Frothingham bore an obvious suggestion.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ’if a single person has been really benefited by all the money Mamma has given away?  Isn’t it likely she has done much more harm than good?’

There was truth in his surmise that Alma sometimes thought with jealousy of Mrs. Frothingham’s having had control of a fortune, whilst she, the only child of him who made the money, possessed nothing of her own.  The same trend of feeling appeared in a word or two of Alma’s, when a daily paper, in speaking of a paltry dividend offered at last to the creditors in one branch of Bennet Frothingham’s speculations, used a particularly bitter phrase.

‘I should have felt that once; now ——­’

In these days Alma suffered from a revival of the indignation which had so perturbed her in the time just before her marriage.  If now she had possessed even a little money, it would have made her independent in a sense far more tangible than that of the friendly understanding with her husband.  She strongly disliked the thought of making Harvey responsible for the expenses of her ‘recital’.  Had it been possible to procure a small sum by any honest means, she would eagerly have turned to it; but no method seemed discoverable.  On her journey homeward after the interview with Felix Dymes, her mind was full of the money question.  What did Dymes mean by bidding her take no thought for expenses?  Could it have occurred to his outrageous vanity that she might be persuaded to become his debtor, with implied obligation of gratitude?