exed. "What am I to do?" he asked.

"Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.
Say that if she sees him ONCE again--"

He reflected. "No," he said at last.

"Poff!" she cried, "every time I see you, you are more and more like
your father. You're going off--just as he did. That baffled, MULISH
look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to
bring into the world. But you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing.
You'll stand everything. You--you Cuckold! And she'll drive by me,
she'll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!
Oh! Oh!"

She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham
sighed profoundly....

It brought the scene to a painful end....

For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.

He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he
could never define what he owed her.

And yet, what on earth was one to do?

And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been
very carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were
entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic
method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the
thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him
to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his
assailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made
conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham
talked and then he would break out suddenly with: "What seems to me
so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second
argument--if one can call it an argument--.... A man who reasons as he
does is bound to get laughed at. If people will only see it...."

CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID

1

Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes
the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
sometimes with great bitterness. When he met White in Joha