An odd expression rose in his eyes.

“You suggest a novel idea, upon my word,” he said.  “Is it possible—­you see I know something of America—­is it possible I must thank you for the working of this magic?”

“You need not thank me,” she said, rather slowly, because it was necessary that she also should think of many things at once.  “I could not have helped doing it.”

She wished to make all clear to him before he met Rosy.  She knew it was not unnatural that the unexpectedness of his appearance might deprive Lady Anstruthers of presence of mind.  Instinct told her that what was needed in intercourse with him was, above all things, presence of mind.

“I will tell you about it,” she said.  “We will walk slowly up and down here, if you do not object.”

He did not object.  He wanted to hear the story as he could not hear it from his nervous little fool of a wife, who would be frightened into forgetting things and their sequence.  What he meant to discover was where he stood in the matter—­where his father-in-law stood, and, rather specially, to have a chance to sum up the weaknesses and strengths of the new arrival.  That would be to his interest.  In talking this thing over she would unconsciously reveal how much vanity or emotion or inexperience he might count upon as factors safe to use in one’s dealings with her in the future.

As he listened he was supported by the fact that he did not lose consciousness of the eyes and the figure.  But for these it is probable that he would have gone blind with fury at certain points which forced themselves upon him.  The first was that there had been an absurd and immense expenditure which would simply benefit his son and not himself.  He could not sell or borrow money on what had been given.  Apparently the place had been re-established on a footing such as it had not rested upon during his own generation, or his father’s.  As he loathed life in the country, it was not he who would enjoy its luxury, but his wife and her child.  The second point was that these people—­this girl—­had somehow had the sharpness to put themselves in the right, and to place him in a position at which he could not complain without putting himself in the wrong.  Public opinion would say that benefits had been heaped upon him, that the correct thing had been done correctly with the knowledge and approval of the legal advisers of his family.  It had been a masterly thing, that visit to Townlinson & Sheppard.  He was obliged to aid his self-control by a glance at the eyelashes.  She was a new sort of girl, this Betty, whose childhood he had loathed, and, to his jaded taste, novelty appealed enormously.  Her attraction for him was also added to by the fact that he was not at all sure that there was not combined with it a pungent spice of the old detestation.  He was repelled as well as allured.  She represented things which he hated.  First, the mere material power, which no man can bully, whatsoever his humour.  It was the power he most longed for and, as he could not hope to possess it, most sneered at and raged against.  Also, as she talked, it was plain that her habit of self-control and her sense of resource would be difficult to deal with.  He was a survival of the type of man whose simple creed was that women should not possess resources, as when they possessed them they could rarely be made to behave themselves.