Richard appeared as they were speaking.

‘What is it, Rodman?’ he asked abruptly, passing into the library.

‘I’ll go to the drawing-room,’ Alice said, and left the men together.

In half an hour Richard again joined her.  He seemed in a better frame of mind, for he came in humming.  Alice, having glanced at him, averted her face again and kept silence.  She felt a hand smoothing her hair.  Her brother, leaning over the back of her seat, whispered to her,—­

‘You’ll help me, Princess?’

She did not answer.

’You won’t be hard, Alice?  It’s a wretched business, and I don’t know what I shall do if you throw me over.  I can’t do without you, old girl.’

’I can’t tell mother, Dick.  You know very well what it’ll be.  I daren’t do that.’

But even that task Alice at last took upon herself, after another half-hour’s discussion.  Alas! she would never again feel towards her brother as before this necessity fell upon her.  Her life had undergone that impoverishment which is so dangerous to elementary natures, the loss of an ideal.

‘You’ll let me stay over to-morrow?’ she said.  ’There’s nothing very pleasant to go back to, and I don’t see that a day ‘ll matter.’

’You can stay if you wish.  I’m going to take you to have tea with Adela now.  If you stay we’ll have her to dinner to-morrow.’

‘I wonder whether we shall get along?’ Alice mused.

’I don’t see why not.  You’ll get lots of things from her, little notions of all kinds.’

This is always a more or less dangerous form of recommendation, even in talking to one’s sister.  To suggest that Adela would benefit by the acquaintance would have been a far more politic procedure.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Alice inquired, still depressed by the scene she had gone through.

’Oh, there’s nothing wrong.  It’s only that you’ll see differences at first; from the people you’ve been used to, I mean.  But I think you’ll have to go and get your things on; it’s nearly five.’

In Alice’s rising from her chair there was nothing of the elasticity that had marked her before luncheon.  Before moving away she spoke a thought that was troubling her.

‘Suppose mother tries to stop it?’

Richard looked to the ground moodily.

‘I meant to tell you,’ he said.  ’You’d better say that I’m already married.’

‘You’re giving me a nice job,’ was the girl’s murmured rejoinder.

‘Well, it’s as good as true.  And it doesn’t make the job any worse.’

As is wont to be the case when two persons come to mutual understanding on a piece of baseness, the tone of brother and sister had suffered in the course of their dialogue.  At first meeting they had both kept a certain watch upon their lips, feeling that their position demanded it; a moral limpness was evident in them by this time.

They set forth to walk to the Walthams’.  Exercise in the keen air, together with the sense of novelty in her surroundings, restored Alice’s good humour before the house was reached.  She gazed with astonishment at the infernal glare over New Wanley.  Her brother explained the sight to her with gusto.