His yacht was lying in a strip of moonlight near Sir Twickenham’s companion yawl.  He gave one glance at it as at a history finished, and sent up his name to Lady Charlotte.

“Ah! you haven’t brought the good old dame with you?” she said, rising to meet him.  “I thought it better not to see her to-night.”

He acquiesced, mentioning the lateness of the hour, and adding, “You are alone?”

She stared, and let fall “Certainly,” and then laughed.  “I had forgotten your regard for the proprieties.  I have just sent my maid for Georgiana; she will sleep here.  I preferred to come here, because those people at the hotel tire me; and, besides, I said I should sleep at the villa, and I never go back to people who don’t expect me.”

Wilfrid looked about the room perplexed, and almost suspicious because of his unexplained perplexity.  Her (as he deemed it—­not much above the level of Mrs. Chump in that respect) aristocratic indifference to opinion and conventional social observances would have pleased him by daylight, but it fretted him now.

Lady Charlotte’s maid came in to say that Miss Ford would join her.  The maid was dismissed to her bed.  “There’s nothing to do there,” said her mistress, as she was moving to the folding-doors.  The window facing seaward was open.  He went straight to it and closed it.  Next, in an apparent distraction, he went to the folding-doors.  He was about to press the handle, when Lady Charlotte’s quiet remark, “My bedroom,” brought him back to his seat, crying pardon.

“Have you had news?” she inquired.  “You thought that a letter might be there.  Bad, is it?”

“It is not good,” he replied, briefly.

“I am sorry.”

“That is—­it tells me—­” (Wilfrid disciplined his tongue) “that I—­we are—­a lieutenant on half-pay may say that he is ruined, I suppose, when his other supplies are cut off!...”

“I can excuse him for thinking it,” said Lady Charlotte.  She exhibited no sign of eagerness for his statement of facts.

Her outward composure and a hard animation of countenance (which, having ceased the talking within himself, he had now leisure to notice) humiliated him.  The sting helped him to progress.

“I may try to doubt it as much as I please, to avoid seeing what must follow....  I may shut my eyes in the dark, but when the light stares me in the face...I give you my word that I have not been justified even in imagining such a catastrophe.”

“The preamble is awful,” said Lady Charlotte, rising from her recumbent posture.

“Pardon me; I have no right to intrude my feelings.  I learn to-day, for the first time, that we are—­are ruined.”

She did not lift her eyebrows, or look fixedly; but without any change at all, said, “Is there no doubt about it?”

“None whatever.”  This was given emphatically.  Resentment at the perfect realization of her anticipated worldly indifference lent him force.