All this happened on a Thursday, and on the following Wednesday Mrs. Walbridge went out quietly, and sent a telegram to Oliver Wick's office, asking him to come and see her that evening. She was to be alone—alone, it seemed to her distracted mind, for the first time for weeks. For every day and all day some one or other of her family had been with her, trying to persuade her to do the thing her soul detested—to divorce her husband.

Maud was very vehement. Her indignation with her father knew no bounds, and Moreton Twiss agreed with his wife. He was a quick-witted man, with a good gift of words, that he poured out unmercifully over the poor little lady, until she felt literally beaten to death.

"It's perfectly disgusting of him," Maud interrupted once. "I should think you would loathe the sight of him. I'm sure I do."

But Mrs. Walbridge did not loathe the sight of her husband. That is, she did not loathe him appreciably more than she had done for years. They might say what they liked. Billy Gaskell-Walker, too, to her amazement, broke into the most hideous, strange language the moment the subject of his father-in-law came up—called him all the names under the heavens. But nothing made any difference. Paul might sneer and make his most razorlike remarks about his father and the lady whom he wished to make their stepmother; Grisel might cry and beg her mother for her sake to put her father clean away.

"It's like a bad rat, or something," the girl said in her high fastidiousness. "He makes the house unpleasant."

But rail, scorn, revile as they might, Mrs. Walbridge had her standpoint, and stuck to it. She did not believe in divorce, and she wasn't going to divorce her husband. What was more, after three days of exasperated wrangling discussion, she surprised them all by bidding them be quiet.

They were having tea, all of them, in the girls' room. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and the two sons-in-law and Paul were drinking whisky and soda. Mrs. Walbridge, looking very small in the corner of the big sofa, suddenly sat bolt upright and looked angrily round at them.

"Oh, hold your tongues, all of you," she cried in a voice of authority. "You mustn't speak of him like that. I won't have it. He's my husband, not yours. Poor fellow!"

They all stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses, which, indeed, one or two of them privately believed she must have done.

"Oh, mother, how can you?" It was naturally Griselda, the baby, who dared defy her. "You don't seem to realise what an utter beast he's been, and how we all loathe him for treating you—yes, you—like this."

"Poor fellow, indeed! Have a little pride, mother," suggested Paul, as if he had said "have a little marmalade." But she didn't waver.

"Yes, poor fellow. I'm extremely sorry for him. You none of you seem to realise what a pitiful thing it is for an old man, the father of a family of grown-up children, to be making such a ridiculous spectacle of himself."

Literally aghast, they stared, first at her, then at each other, and in the silence she marched in triumph out of the room. Her misery was very great, in spite of the queerness of her attitude, for she felt keenly the pathos of her utter detachment of attitude, and her mind was thrown back violently into the old days thirty years before, when she had loved him, when she had believed in him, and defied and given up her whole little world for his sake.

Poor Sir John Barclay still remembered her unhappiness and preoccupation in the old days that summer at High Wycombe, but she had not told him she had been suffering because she had been sent to the country by her furious father to get her away from Ferdinand Walbridge. He did not know how she had hoped against hope that Walbridge would, by some means, find out where she was and get a letter to her, or manage to see her. She had almost forgotten these things herself, until this business of Clara Crichell had brought them back to her memory. It was a tragic, heart-breaking thing, she felt, that an honest, romantic, deep love such as hers had been for the beautiful young man her father had so detested, could ever die so utterly as hers had.

It was dreadful to her, and seemed a shameful thing, that she could feel no pang of jealousy or loneliness in the knowledge that her husband, her companion for thirty years and the father of her five children, was prepared to give up these children, his home life and her companionship for another woman. Instead of what she believed would have been normal emotions, she was conscious of a deep sorrow that he had been such a fool as to fall in love with a woman of Mrs. Crichell's type, for she knew with uncanny clearness exactly what Mrs. Crichell was. If only he had fallen in love with someone who might possibly make him happy, someone who was companionable and ambitious! But this woman, she knew, was so like himself in her laziness, mental vacuity and self-centred one-sidedness, that they were bound to destroy each other.

The whole family had assumed that her sole reason for refusing the divorce was a semi-religious objection to that institution. It was true that, although she was not a religious woman, her innate respect for the forms of the church gave her the greatest possible horror of the divorce court, but she knew, though none of the others seemed to suspect it, that if Clara Crichell had been a different kind of woman, one with whom she could, so to speak, trust her poor, faulty Ferdie, her objections would have been bound to give way, in the course of time, to the combined wishes of her family and friends. And she was afraid to utter this instinctive fear of Mrs. Crichell because, although she knew little of real life, she had an uncanny knowledge of the mental workings of the men and women in books, who are, after all, more or less, like human beings; and she felt that she could not bear to be misunderstood, as she was certain to be if she uttered one word of personal objection to Mrs. Crichell. They would all think she was jealous, and she would be unable to persuade them that she was not.

Oliver found her pacing up and down her drawing-room in her afternoon gown, which she had forgotten to fasten down the back, and which showed a pathetic strip of merino petticoat.

"Something's wrong with your back here," he said. "Shall I hook it up? I often fasten Jenny's new-fangled things, and they hook up to her neck. Well, here I am, Mrs. Walbridge, À la disposition di Usted."

One of his useful little gifts was a way of keeping in mind, and reproducing with impeccable inflection, little once-heard scraps of foreign languages, and somehow it comforted the worried woman to hear him talking so much in his usual manner; in spite of Grisel's engagement, his world had not turned over.

"Have you—have you heard anything about us lately?" she began nervously, as they sat down, and she nodded at his battered old cigarette case, held interrogatively up to her.

"Yes," he answered abruptly, his manner changing. "I hear that Grisel has a string of pearls, and is growing very fond of her aged suitor."

"He's not an aged suitor, and you mustn't call him one.

"Well, then, her gay young spark. It doesn't really matter, and she's not really happy, and I know it, and so do you."

"Oh, Oliver, please don't make me unhappy about that. Things are bad enough without Grisel's coming to grief."

He pricked his ears. "What do you mean—things are bad enough? What's happened? I'm not going to worry you. I'm sorry——"

"It's about—it's about Mr. Walbridge. I don't quite know how to tell you."

Oliver looked hastily round the room. "Oh, no, he's not here. He went away yesterday morning."

"Gone away? Good heavens! Has he been losing money?"

"No; he has no money," she answered simply. "It's much worse than that. It's—it's about a lady."

He gave a long whistle. "By golly! Is it, though? Then I'll bet it's that over-ripe woman who sat next him at dinner—the painter's wife."

"Yes, it is. They have fallen in love with each other."

The young man threw his cigarette in the fire in his excitement.

"No! They can't have. Why, bless me, he's an old man—I beg your pardon. But he isn't young, is he?"

"That doesn't matter. He's fallen in love with her and Mr. Crichell's found out."

"My hat! The man with the nasty fingers."

"Yes. And they're all after me—not a soul stands up for me, Oliver. So that's why I sent for you. I thought perhaps you would."

"Of course I will. You want someone to see you through divorcing him. Well, I'm your boy. Have you got a solicitor? And—excuse me speaking so plainly—have you got proofs?"

She laughed forlornly at his mistake. "Oh, my dear, you've got it all wrong. It's the other way about. It's they that want me to divorce him and I—I won't."

His face changed. He looked at her with surprise and commiseration in his eyes.

"Oh, I see," he said quietly. "I didn't understand."

He felt that it would be indecorous for him to ask this old lady, as he considered her, whether she really cared for the husband he had always found so unpleasant, but he could in no way account for her refusing to take the obvious course.

She saw his perplexity and went straight to the point. "You see," she said, "I know what you are thinking, but I've known Mr. Walbridge for a long time, and I know that he couldn't possibly be happy with a woman as selfish and self-centred as Mrs. Crichell."

"Then you want him to be happy?" He spoke very gravely, his voice sounding like that of a man very much older than himself.

She was grateful to him for not showing any surprise at her attitude.

"Oh, yes. I should like him to be happy. You're too young to understand, Oliver. I hope you never will understand. But I'm not at all angry with him, and I've always disliked Mrs. Crichell very much."

"So have I. Couldn't bear her, and neither could my mother. But why did you send for me, Mrs. Walbridge? I'll do any mortal thing for you, but the better I understand, the more useful I shall be."

"Oh, I just want you to stand up for me when they all attack me, and try to make me divorce him."

"I see. I certainly think the choice ought to be yours. But," he added, "I don't agree with you. I—I think you're making a mistake. By the way, has the lady any money?"

"Oh, yes, she's quite well off."

There was a pause, at the end of which he said, "Well, I—it beats me. Why do you suppose she wants him?" Then he added, feeling that he had failed in tact, in thus speaking of the man who, after all, was his companion's husband, and whom she wanted, in her queer way, to help. "Well, it beats me."

"Mr. Walbridge has always been considered a very handsome man," she said, in a voice of complete clarity and explanation. And then the door opened and Griselda came suddenly in, wrapped in a big fur-collared velvet cloak.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, on seeing Wick. "I didn't know anyone was here. They all went on to the opera," she said, sitting down and letting her cloak slip back, "and my head ached—I think I've a cold coming on—so I got a taxi and came home. How are you, Oliver, and how is your mother? I saw Jenny the other day, but I was in a taxi and she didn't see me."

"They're both well, thanks," he answered. "It's a long time since I saw you, young lady."

"Yes, it is."

There was a pause, and Mrs. Walbridge glanced anxiously from one to the other of the two painstakingly indifferent faces.

"No letters, mother?" the girl asked.

"Yes, there are two for you. One from Sir John."

"Good, I'll go and get them." She held out her hand to Oliver. "Then I'll go on up to bed. I really do feel rather bad. Good-night."

He held her hand closely. "You're a nice young minx," he told her, laughing. "I suppose you think I ought to congratulate you on your engagement."

"It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether you do or not."

"Grisel, Grisel!" put in her mother.

Still he held her hand, his critical eyes looking her up and down.

"Good-night," she said again, trying to withdraw her hand.

"You're losing your looks," he declared. "You're too thin, and your eyes are sunk into your head. It won't do, Grisel. You'll have to give in. You used to be the prettiest thing alive, and unless you own up to your old gentleman and confess to me that you can't live without me, you'll soon have to join the sad army of the girls who aren't so pretty as they feel."

She was furiously angry—so angry that she could not speak, and when he suddenly let go her hand, she stumbled back and nearly fell. She left the room without a word, and he sat down and hid his face for a moment in his hands.

Mrs. Walbridge was indignant with him, but somehow she dared not speak, and after a minute he rose.

"I'll go now," he said. "I'm done. Little brute!"

"I'm so sorry for you," she said, which was quite different from what she had meant to say.

"I know you are, and I deserve it; I deserve everybody's pity. But damn it all," he added, with sudden brightness, pushing back the strands of straight dun-coloured hair that hung down over his damp forehead, "I'll get her yet."

She went with him to the door, and they stood on the step in the bitter cold of the still night.

"You'll stand by me then? You'll believe," she added earnestly, laying her hand on his sleeve, "that I'm not just being a cat; that I really am doing what I know will be best for him in the long run?"

"If you suddenly spat at me and scratched my eyes out and ran up the wall there, and sat licking your fur, I shouldn't believe you were a cat. But, mind you, Mrs. Walbridge, I think you are making a great mistake. What on earth will you do with him about the house in this frame of mind?"

"Oh, don't make it any harder for me. I know that I'm right."

They parted very kindly, and she went back into the house, knowing that he would, as she expressed it, take sides with her. But something of the virtue of her resolution seemed to have gone out of her, for, young as he was, she respected his shrewdness and his instinct, and it depressed her to know that he disapproved of her determination.

The next evening, Wick dined with the Gaskell-Walkers in Campden Hill. He was the only guest, and Hermione told him at once that they had sent for him in order to talk over this disgusting business of her father's. When Gaskell-Walker had laid before him the combined reasons of the whole tribe for wishing for the divorce, Wick sat down his glass and looked at his host.

"I agree with every word you've said," he answered, without unnecessary words. "It's a great mistake, but I know why she's doing it."

"That's more than any of us knows," mourned Hermione. "I feel that I never wish to look my father in the face again."

"Oh, that's going too far," the young man protested. "He's an awful old scoundrel, of course, but still, there are plenty more like him."

Before they parted, Wick uttered a word of wisdom. "She won't give in to you, or any of you, or to me," he said. "There's nothing so obstinate in this world as a good woman fighting for a principle, and the fact that the principle is perfectly idiotic has no bearing on the case. But your mother's an old-fashioned woman, Mrs. Gaskell-Walker, and she's written so many sentimental stories that her whole mind is coloured by them. If you can get Mrs. Crichell to go to your mother and grovel and tear her hair and cry, your mother would divorce your father." Then he went his way.

"By Jove!" Gaskell-Walker said to his wife. "I believe he's right. Stout fellow! I'll put your father up to this. I'll look him up at lunch at Seeley's to-morrow."