Janet stared at her, and the squire threw his head back with an amazed interjection.

‘What!  You’re for it now?  Why, at breakfast you were all t’ other way!  You didn’t want this meeting because you pooh-poohed the match.’

‘I do think you should go,’ she answered.  ’You have given Harry your promise, and if he empowers you, it is right to make the proposal, and immediately, I think.’

She spoke feverishly, with an unsweet expression of face, that seemed to me to indicate vexedness at the squire’s treatment of my father.

‘Harry,’ she asked me in a very earnest fashion, ’is it your desire?  Tell your grandfather that it is, and that you want to know your fate.  Why should there be any dispute on a fact that can be ascertained by crossing a street?  Surely it is trifling.’

Janet stooped to whisper in the squire’s ear.

He caught the shock of unexpected intelligence apparently; faced about, gazed up, and cried:  ’You too!  But I haven’t done here.  I ’ve got to cross-examine . . .  Pretend, do you mean?  Pretend I’m ready to go?  I can release this prince just as well here as there.’

Janet laughed faintly.

‘I should advise your going, grandada.’

‘You a weathercock woman!’ he reproached her, quite mystified, and fell to rubbing his head.  ‘Suppose I go to be snubbed?’

’The prince is a gentleman, grandada.  Come with me.  We will go alone.  You can relieve the prince, and protect him.’

My father nodded:  ‘I approve.’

‘And grandada—­but it will not so much matter if we are alone, though,’ Janet said.

‘Speak out.’

‘See the princess as well; she must be present.’

‘I leave it to you,’ he said, crestfallen.

Janet pressed my aunt Dorothy’s hand.

’Aunty, you were right, you are always right.  This state of suspense is bad all round, and it is infinitely worse for the prince and princess.’

My aunt Dorothy accepted the eulogy with a singular trembling wrinkle of the forehead.

She evidently understood that Janet had seen her wish to get released.

For my part, I shared my grandfather’s stupefaction at their unaccountable changes.  It appeared almost as if my father had won them over to baffle him.  The old man tried to insist on their sitting down again, but Janet perseveringly smiled and smiled until he stood up.  She spoke to him softly.  He was one black frown; displeased with her; obedient, however.

Too soon after, I had the key to the enigmatical scene.  At the moment I was contemptuous of riddles, and heard with idle ears Janet’s promptings to him and his replies.  ‘It would be so much better to settle it here,’ he said.  She urged that it could not be settled here without the whole burden and responsibility falling upon him.

‘Exactly,’ interposed my father, triumphing.

Dorothy Beltham came to my side, and said, as if speaking to herself, while she gazed out of window, ’If a refusal, it should come from the prince.’  She dropped her voice:  ’The money has not been spent?  Has it?  Has any part of it been spent?  Are you sure you have more than three parts of it?’