h luxury, with
movement, with music, with a sense of danger that gave a strong and
subtle flavour to her pleasures, was the explanation (and the only one)
of how she bore the hours of reaction, of the nausea experienced by that
spiritual nature of hers which she had been so surprised to discover. It
was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in
the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now. That Molly was gone, and
he regretted her.

CHAPTER XXVII

MOLLY'S APPEAL

Edmund, it seemed, was in no hurry to see his Florentine looking-glasses
again. Ten days passed before he called on Molly, and on the eleventh
day Mr. Murray, Junior, wrote to say that he had some fresh and
important intelligence to give him, and asked if Sir Edmund would call,
not at his office, but at his own house.

Edmund flung the letter down impatiently. The situation was really a
very trying one. He did not believe--he could not and would not
believe--that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud. Murray was a
lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and
absurd. From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother's
reply to her offer to go to Florence, Edmund had in his masculine way
ranged her once for all among good and nice women. He had felt touched
and guilty at a suspicion that he had been to blame in playing his
paternal _role_ too zealously. Until then he had at times had hard
thoughts of her; after that time he was a little ashamed of himself, and
he believed in her simplicity and goodness. He was sorry and
disappointed now that she was making quite so much effect in this London
world. There was something disquieting in Molly's success, and he could
appraise better than any one what a remarkable success it was. But he
felt that she was going the pace, and he would not have liked his
daughter to go the pace, unmarried and at twenty-two. She needed
friendship and advice. But the pinch came from the fact that the wealth
he could have advised her to use wisely ought to be Rose's, and that he
was resolved, in the depths of his soul, to regain that wealth for his
cousin--for that "_belle dame sans merci_" who wrote him such pretty
letters about his troubles.

Edmund put Murray's letter in his pocket, and immediately went out. He
was living in a small, but clean, lodging in Fulham, kept by a former
housemaid and a former footman of his own, now Mr. and Mrs. Tart, kindly
souls who