A few moments later I was staring at the paper in blank horror and dismay.

Harry was found.  There was no mistake.  Harry Robinson, junior partner of the firm of Robinson & Co., of Mincing Lane.  Vain, indeed, would it be to seek the help of Great Scotland Yard.  Harry had blown out his brains in the South Western Hotel at Southampton.

I have read the newspaper paragraph over and over again to-night.  There is no possible room for doubt that it is the same Harry.

The ways of man are past interpretation.  Here is an individual who lures a girl from an oriental harem, attires her in disgusting garments, smuggles her on board a steamer, where he claps her, so to speak, under hatches, and has little if anything to do with her, sets her penniless and ticketless in a London train, and then goes off and blows his brains out.  Where is the sense of it?

I have not a spark of sympathy for Harry—­a callow, egotistical dealer in currants.  He ought to have blown out his brains a year ago.  He has behaved in a most unconscionable manner.  How does he expect me to break the news to Carlotta?  His selfishness is appalling.  There he lies, comfortably dead in the South Western Hotel, while Carlotta has literally not a rag to her back, her horrific belongings having been dropped into the dust-bin.  Who does he think is going to provide Carlotta with food and shelter and a pink dress?  What does he imagine is to become of the poor waif?  In all my life I have never heard of a more cynical suicide.

I have walked about for hours, laughing and cursing and kicking the binding loose of my precious Muratori.  I have wondered whether the universe or I were mad.  For there is one thing that is clear to me—­Carlotta is here, and here Carlotta must remain.

Devastating though it be to the well-ordered quietude of my life, I must adopt Carlotta.

There is no way out of it.

CHAPTER IV

May 25th.

Shall I be accused of harbouring a bevy of odalisques at No. 20 Lingfield Terrace?  Calumny and Exaggeration walk abroad, arm in arm, even on the north side of Regent’s Park.  If they had spied Carlotta at my window this morning, they would have looked in for afternoon tea at my Aunt Jessica’s and have waylaid Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne outside the Oratory.  The question is:  Shall Truth anticipate them?  I think not.  Every family has its irrepressible, impossible, unpractical member, its enfant terrible, who is forever doing the wrong thing with the best intentions.  Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues.  Some times it puts them to the blush and throws them into confusion; at others it blusters like a blatant liar; at others, again, it stutters and stammers like a detected thief.  There is no knowing how Truth may behave, so I shall not let it visit my relations.