Betty laid a hand on her shoulder and looked at her fixedly.

“What is it, Rosy?” she said.  “What is it he does to you—­that makes you like this?”

“I don’t know—­but that he makes me feel that there is nothing but evil and lies in the world and nothing can help one against them.  Those things he says about everyone—­men and women—­things one can’t repeat—­make me sick.  And when I try to deny them, he laughs.”

“Does he say things about me?” Betty inquired, very quietly, and suddenly Rosalie threw her arms round her.

“Betty, darling,” she cried, “go home—­go home.  You must not stay here.”

“When I go, you will go with me,” Betty answered.  “I am not going back to mother without you.”

She made a collection of many facts before their interview was at an end, and they parted for the night.  Among the first was that Nigel had prepared for certain possibilities as wise holders of a fortress prepare for siege.  A rather long sitting alone over whisky and soda had, without making him loquacious, heated his blood in such a manner as led him to be less subtle than usual.  Drink did not make him drunk, but malignant, and when a man is in the malignant mood, he forgets his cleverness.  So he revealed more than he absolutely intended.  It was to be gathered that he did not mean to permit his wife to leave him, even for a visit; he would not allow himself to be made ridiculous by such a thing.  A man who could not control his wife was a fool and deserved to be a laughing-stock.  As Ughtred and his future inheritance seemed to have become of interest to his grandfather, and were to be well nursed and taken care of, his intention was that the boy should remain under his own supervision.  He could amuse himself well enough at Stornham, now that it had been put in order, if it was kept up properly and he filled it with people who did not bore him.  There were people who did not bore him—­plenty of them.  Rosalie would stay where she was and receive his guests.  If she imagined that the little episode of Ffolliott had been entirely dormant, she was mistaken.  He knew where the man was, and exactly how serious it would be to him if scandal was stirred up.  He had been at some trouble to find out.  The fellow had recently had the luck to fall into a very fine living.  It had been bestowed on him by the old Duke of Broadmorlands, who was the most strait-laced old boy in England.  He had become so in his disgust at the light behaviour of the wife he had divorced in his early manhood.  Nigel cackled gently as he detailed that, by an agreeable coincidence, it happened that her Grace had suddenly become filled with pious fervour—­roused thereto by a good-looking locum tenens—­result, painful discoveries—­the pair being now rumoured to be keeping a lodging-house together somewhere in Australia.  A word to good old Broadmorlands would produce the effect of a lighted match on a barrel of gunpowder.  It would be the end of Ffolliott.