."

"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate.
Still, I'm afraid there's likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I
hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"

She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace
herself already for the work before us:

"Well, we must do this because we can't help doing it, and because,
whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me,
Basil!"

"I? To Mrs. Hasketh's?"

"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral
support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had
better not lose any time."

"To-morrow is Sunday."

"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they're there
at all, yet."

She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh
really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.

V.

The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden
trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter
old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence,
painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height
of one's shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed
X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set
with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out
people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did.
There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far
back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the
trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk.
Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I
should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but
now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something
severe, something hopelessly forbidding.

I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and
the Haskeths, before Tedham's calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh
did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her
husband come forward, in Tedham's behalf, and do what hopelessly could
be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only
thing to be attempted was to show circumstances that might perhaps tend
to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had
confessed himself and h