‘I am ashamed —­ I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘No time shall be lost.’  He rose.  ’If Mrs. Handover will help us, I will bring her here; then I shall see you again.  In any case, of course, I will come back —­ there will be other business.  But you ought to have some friend —­ some lady.’

‘There’s no one I can ask.’

‘Oh, but of all the people you know in London —­ surely!’

’They are not friends in that sense.  I understand it now —­ fifty acquaintances; no friend.’

’But let me think —­ let me think.  What was the name of that lady I met here, whose children you used to teach?’

’Mrs. Langland.  She is very kind and friendly, but she lives at Gunnersbury —­ so far —­ and I couldn’t trouble her.’

Upon one meeting and a short conversation, with subsequent remarks from Edgar Abbott, Rolfe had grounded a very favourable opinion of Mrs Langland.  She dwelt clearly in his mind as ’a woman with no nonsense about her’, likely to be of much helpfulness at a crisis such as the present.  With difficulty he persuaded Mrs. Abbott to sit down and write a few lines, to be posted at once to Gunnersbury.

‘I haven’t dared to ask her to come.  But I have said that I am alone.’

‘Quite enough, I think, if she is at home.’

He took his leave, and drove back to Bayswater, posting the letter and despatching two telegrams on the way.

Of course, his visit to Greystone was given up.

CHAPTER 6

Hugh Carnaby was gratified by the verdict of felo de se.  He applauded the jury for their most unexpected honesty.  One had taken for granted the foolish tag about temporary madness, which would have been an insult to everybody’s common-sense.

’It’s a pity they no longer bury at four cross-roads, with a stake in his inside. (Where’s that from?  I remember it somehow.) The example wouldn’t be bad.’

‘You’re rather early-Victorian,’ replied Sibyl, who by this term was wont to signify barbarism or crudity in art, letters, morality, or social feeling.  ’Besides, there’s no merit in the verdict.  It only means that the City jury is in a rage.  Yet every one of them would be dishonest on as great a scale if they dared, or had the chance.’

‘Something in that, I dare say,’ conceded Hugh.

He admired his wife more than ever.  Calm when she lost her trinkets, Sibyl exhibited no less self-command now that she was suddenly deprived of her whole fortune, about eight hundred a year.  She had once remarked on the pleasantness and fitness of a wife’s possessing in her own name an income equal to that of her husband; yet she resigned it without fuss.  Indeed, Sibyl never made a fuss about anything.  She intimated her wishes, and, as they were always possible of gratification, obtained them as a matter of course.  Naturally, since their marriage, she and Hugh had lived to the full extent of their means.  Carnaby had reduced his capital by a couple of thousand pounds in preliminary expenses, and debt to the amount of two or three hundred was outstanding at the end of the first twelvemonth; but Sibyl manifested no alarm.