‘You had better take this, papa,’ Mrs Trevelyan had said, when she received from the office of Mr Bideawhile a cheque payable to her order for the money sent to her by her husband’s direction.

‘I do not want the man’s money,’ said Sir Marmaduke.  ’But you are going to this place for my sake, papa and it is right that he should bear the expense for his own wife.  And, papa, you must remember always that though his mind is distracted on this horrible business, he is not a bad man.  No one is more liberal or more just about money.’  Sir Marmaduke’s feelings on the matter were very much the same as those which had troubled Mr Outhouse, and he, personally, refused to touch the money; but his daughter paid her own share of the expenses of the journey.

They travelled at their ease, stopping at Paris, and at Geneva, and at Milan.  Lady Rowley thought that she was taken very fast, because she was allowed to sleep only two nights at each of these places, and Sir Rowley himself thought that he had achieved something of a Hannibalian enterprise in taking five ladies and two maids over the Simplon and down into the plains of Lombardy, with nobody to protect him but a single courier.  He had been a little nervous about it, being unaccustomed to European travelling, and had not at first realised the fact that the journey is to be made with less trouble than one from the Marble Arch to Mile End.  ‘My dears,’ he said to his younger daughters, as they were rattling round the steep downward twists and turns of the great road, ’you must sit quite still on these descents, or you do not know where you may go.  The least thing would overset us.’  But Lucy and Sophy soon knew better, and became so intimate with the mountain, under the friendly guidance of their courier, that before the plains were reached, they were in and out, and here and there, and up and down, as though they had been bred among the valleys of the pass.  There would come a ringing laugh from some rock above their head, and Lady Rowley looking up would see their dresses fluttering on a pinnacle which appeared to her to be fit only for a bird; and there would be the courier behind them, with two parasols, and a shawl, and a cloak, and an eye-glass, and a fine pair of grizzled whiskers.  They made an Alpine club of their own, refusing to admit their father because he would not climb up a rock, and Nora thought of the letters about it which she would write to her lover, only that she had determined that she would not write to him at all without telling her mother, and Mrs Trevelyan would for moments almost forget that she had been robbed of her child.