‘You have no right to ask anything whatever about me,’ came from Nancy, who was already moving away.

He allowed her to go.

‘So it is to be as I wished,’ he said to himself, with mock courage.  ‘So much the better.’

And he went home to a night of misery.

CHAPTER 6

Not long after the disappearance of Fanny French, Mrs. Damerel called one day upon Luckworth Crewe at his office in Farringdon Street.  Crewe seldom had business with ladies, and few things could have surprised him more than a visit from this lady in particular, whom he knew so well by name, and regarded with such special interest.  She introduced herself as a person wishing to find a good investment for a small capital; but the half-hour’s conversation which followed became in the end almost a confidential chat.  Mrs. Damerel spoke of her nephew Horace Lord, with whom, she understood, Mr. Crewe was on terms of intimacy; she professed a grave solicitude on his account, related frankly the unhappy circumstances which had estranged the young man from her, and ultimately asked whether Crewe could not make it worth his own while to save Horace from the shoals of idleness, and pilot him into some safe commercial haven.  This meeting was the first of many between the fashionable lady and the keen man of affairs.  Without a suspicion of how it had come about, Horace Lord presently found himself an informal partner in Crewe’s business; he invested only a nominal sum, which might be looked upon as a premium of apprenticeship; but there was an understanding that at the close of the term of tutelage imposed by his father’s will, he should have the offer of a genuine partnership on very inviting terms.

Horace was not sorry to enter again upon regular occupation.  He had considerably damaged his health in the effort to live up to his ideal of thwarted passion, and could no longer entertain a hope that Fanny’s escapade was consistent with innocence.  Having learnt how money slips through the fingers of a gentleman with fastidious tastes, he welcomed a prospect of increased resources, and applied himself with some energy to learning his new business.  But with Mrs. Damerel he utterly refused to be reconciled, and of his sister he saw very little.  Nancy, however, approved the step he had taken, and said she would be content to know that all was well with him.

Upon a Sunday morning, when the church bells had ceased to clang, Luckworth Crewe, not altogether at his ease in garb of flagrant respectability, sat by the fireside of a pleasant little room conversing with Mrs. Damerel.  Their subject, as usual at the beginning of talk, was Horace Lord.

‘He won’t speak of you at all,’ said Crewe, in a voice singularly subdued, sympathetic, respectful.  ’I have done all I could, short of telling him that I know you.  He’s very touchy still on that old affair.’

‘How would he like it,’ asked the lady, ’if you told him that we are acquaintances?’